> Since the mid-2000s, right after it became available, I started using Google Analytics for almost every website I built (whether it be mine or someone else). It quickly became (and remains) the de-facto standard for website usage analytics and user tracking.
I ask everyone to consider is whether they actually need analytics at all. I think in many cases the answer is "well, no, but it's nice to have…". Sure, it would be nice to know how many people visit my personal website, but I don't think it's worth sending extra JavaScript to people for, or dealing with the risk that I may be collecting more information than I actually want.
This is why I'm more comfortable with Fathom; I have removed GA from sites in the past when I realize I haven't logged into view stats for years. But for a few sites it is very helpful to have some data, especially to see if there's an older article getting a lot of consistent traffic (I'll brush it up and make sure it's more current).
I know most people don't care to look back much, and leave old content to rot... but most of the pages with over 100,000 lifetime visits are pages from 3+ years ago (like this ridiculously short post on how to sync a shared Google Calendar with Calendars on macOS/iOS[1]).
> But for a few sites it is very helpful to have some data, especially to see if there's an older article getting a lot of consistent traffic (I'll brush it up and make sure it's more current).
Usually my solution for this issue is to use people emailing me about things as a proxy of whether I should go back to something, and I think it works pretty well (though, I don't have the data to compare, ironically ;) ). If something's useful to many people but wrong/broken, eventually someone is nice enough to let me know. This has the benefit of making user consent very explicit, since they can choose exactly how much they want to "share" with me.
Also, I'm enjoying the @media(perfers-color-scheme: dark) support on your website! I usually call these out when I see them, since they're still rare, but it was before sunset when I first commented so I wasn't using Dark Mode then.
Ha, thanks for noticing! I enjoy browsing in Safari Technology Preview more often than not lately because more tech sites are starting to adopt a dark mode color scheme.
There are still a couple of bugs I need to work out with code display in a few spots (mostly because of some old color-unaware plugins I use), but it was pretty quick and easy; I wrote up my process here[1].
Yeah, this basically mirrors my experience converting my own website. I browse exclusively in Safari Technology Preview, so I'm always pleasantly surprised when I come across websites that support the feature (interestingly, it seems like Twitter has a dark mode implementation, but only on their mobile website (?!); their normal desktop website, which is the only place where this feature is supported doesn't have this).
A number of the large ad networks I work with requested Google Analytics data for review when going through my application.
If you ever want to sell your site, having a decade of Google Analytics is valuable.
Yes, you could use a different analytics software or logs for the above. However, since Google Analytics is the standard, it's familiar, trustworthy, and performs equally across all sites. For example, Google Analytics shows I have about 1,000,000 page views a day. I have Apache blocking at least 30 user agents from common types of bots and scripts. Even so, my database logs show about 10,000,000 page views a day getting through to my site. That's a pretty large difference in reporting. This is why if someone is buying or analyzing a site, they want to compare the same source, such as Google Analytics, across all properties they're considering.
This is a problem I see - that no two analytics engines actually agree on the numbers, and none of them agree with my server logs.
I just flat don't trust GA, on anything. I can't trust it to give me the right numbers, so how do I know the rest of the data is actually correct, and what is the point of slowing my site down to have it?
I'll have a look at Fathom. If its numbers agree with my server logs then I'll think about adding it in. I can see the usefulness, but I'd prefer to just analyse the logs I'm already keeping (and maybe expand them to include user behaviour on the client).
If you ever want to sell your site, a decade of data is valuable. But the relevant part is when you start growing. If you have a couple of visitors, just maintain the site for fun (like my personal blog and some handy tools that I and a few others use), the data of that period is not going to be very interesting anyway. Once it starts growing and you start thinking "maybe this site has value for many people", then the analytics is more than -- as your parent comment says -- "well, no, but it's nice to have…". I don't think you're disagreeing: it's valuable if you want to sell, but if it's only nice to have and not necessary, you're probably also not having the kind of site worth selling.
So in conclusion, I support not putting analytics on sites that don't need it. And if it turns out you need it, most of it can be reconstructed from access logs (perhaps not the user's screen resolution, but definitely rough visitor counts). We have enough bloated pages already. But of course, if you already expect that you might need the data later, it's a different kind of site.
Stats were very important to me and other people I worked with.
Up until the time that google started hiding the keywords people used to find the sites / pages.
Now stats are not very helpful for us really. I do occasionally scroll through them and look for anomalies. Like heavy errors or subdomains or something as an entry point for example.
However just getting the basic server stats with awstats or analog or whatever is plenty. There is no need for third party java and such.
Without the keywords matching up to entry pages, it's mainly cpu usage and error codes that are worth checking. ommv.
I ask everyone to consider is whether they actually need analytics at all. I think in many cases the answer is "well, no, but it's nice to have…". Sure, it would be nice to know how many people visit my personal website, but I don't think it's worth sending extra JavaScript to people for, or dealing with the risk that I may be collecting more information than I actually want.