It seems these days you need to be certified by Google to setup Google Analytics for your webiste. With Plausible Analytics you sign up, add less than 1KB of code to your site, and you’re up and running.
For those who don’t know, Plausible Analytics is a relatively new, web analytics company/service, what makes them special to me aside from ease of use, is that they’re committed to privacy first, GDPR compliance, and they aren’t tracking you or I across the web. Their business model doesn’t not have a free tier, website owners pay a very reasonable fee, and in return they get simple analytics about how well their website is doing. For the advanced SEO guys, they also integrate with Google Search Console.
For this website, all I want to know is
- How many people visit the website?
- What pages are popular?
- What is driving traffic to the website?
- What devices people are using to get to this website?
- Maybe one day I’ll need to know more, I can create and track goals
The documentation for PA is extensive so you should check it out and see if it does some advanced things you feel you need.
Anyway, this site is powered by Jekyll and uses the Minimal Mistakes theme, which has support for Analytics built in, so all you need to do is edit your _config.yml
analytics:
provider: "custom"
And then modify _includes/analytics-providers/custom.html.
You could use the jekyll-analytics gem, but you need to be aware of this issue when it comes to making it work with Plausible.