Simple, privacy-oriented, website metrics

Question

I have a personal website (I work in academia) and I want to know how many people visited my website. Secondary, if possible, also for how long, and what pages they navigated to.

However, I don't want to know their location, language, screen size, ISP, etc. Moreover, I don't want Google or anyone else to get all this information from people visiting my website.

Is there any alternative to GA I can use? If possible, something barebone, self-hosted, and privacy oriented.

At the moment I use gohugo, netlify, and github to host my website and I have GA to monitor the traffic.

Answer 1

You should give GoatCounter a try:

GoatCounter is an open source web analytics platform available as a hosted service (free for non-commercial use) or self-hosted app. It aims to offer easy to use and meaningful privacy-friendly web analytics as an alternative to Google Analytics or Matomo

This solution is lightweight (2.5Kb) and privacy-aware: it does not use cookies or persistently storing any personal data

You can learn more in this presentation by the author and checkout the screenshots on the homepage

I'm using it since ~6 months with Hugo, works flawless. You just need to create a free account and insert a line of code in your footer to start using the hosted service, and then decide if you go for self-hosting

It's similar to Fathom, but the pricing is based on donations and can eventually be used for free

Answer 2

It wasn't around at the time of your question, but I'd now suggest Fathom. Fast, Simple and Privacy focussed.

Answer 3

You can try open source analytics, but can or will be limited in support. Some of them that have considerable user base are -

• Snowplow Analytics
• Piwik now Matamo
• AWStats - more of a log analyzer tool