I removed Google Analytics from my blog

For the longest time, I’ve used Google Analytics to power the analytics of this blog.

It was an ok solution.

I never particularly liked Google Analytics as a product. It’s super bloated. Has tons and tons of features I never used that maybe could have be hidden behind an “advanced” flag.

But hey, it was free.

But a few days ago I removed it.

The main reason is that this year Google Analytics in the format I used up to now (Universal Analytics) will be disabled, and the new “Google Analytics 4” will be forced for everyone.

And.. drumroll… 🥁 …with no one-click or automatic migration for all the old data.

Crazy right?

That forced me out of inertia and laziness, to look for something else.

I tried a few solutions.

Here’s the thing. I never want to self-host anything.

I also don’t want to pay for a service.

The amount of pageviews this blog gets make every hosted solution impractical.

I can’t spend hundreds and hundreds of € every year just to see how many clicks my site gets.

I don’t think analytics are that important for me.

In the beginning it was very cool to see anyone looking at my site. A spike here and there, where do people come from, etc.

What I care about is that the site is working, not how many thousands people visited today.

It can be a valuable metric for other people, but I don’t actually care that much.

I can assume people visit the site, how many I don’t know but what’s the difference between say 5000 and 20000? It’s still a lot of people.

It’s really fun to watch smaller sites grow, but once a site has reached this level, hundreds of thousands of visitors every month, it’s.. done.

Anyway.

I thought about removeing analytics completely, but who knows, maybe in the future those metrics could be useful to look back to.

So I set up a self-hosted version of Plausible Analytics, which is a great tool but I could not justify the price for the views this blog gets, plus all the other sites I have.

I still paid them a year of the hosted plan, as a thank you for making it open source and easy to set up.