Using analytics on my website

GoAccess seems pretty cool and is probably a good task for the job, when you need something simple, thanks for recommending it: https://goaccess.io/

Even if you have analytics of some sort already in place, I think it'd probably still be a nice idea to run GoAccess on your server, behind some additional auth, so you can check up on how the web servers are performing (in lieu of other options that aggregate your web server logs).

That said, I'd still say that the analytics solutions out there, especially self-hostable ones like Matomo, are quite nice and can have both UIs that are very easy to interact with for the average person (e.g. filtering data by date range, or by page/view that was interacted with), as well as have a plethora of different datasets: https://matomo.org/features/

I think it can be useful to have a look at what sorts of devices are mostly being used to interact with your site, what operating systems and browsers are in use, how people navigate through the site, where do they enter the site from and how they find it, what the front end performance is like, or even how your e-commerce site is doing, at a glance, in addition to seeing how this changes over time.

As for performance, I guess it depends on whether you care about any of the above, whether they actually help you make your site better. If performance was the top goal, we probably wouldn't be using Angular, React or anything like that in the first place, but only very lightweight options. Or, you know, not putting ads or auto playing videos on the sites either.

People have also said good things about Plausible Analytics as well: https://plausible.io/

If I remember correctly, CloudFlare Analytics does not need you to register your domain with them. I personally feel keeping domain registration coupled with your DNS provider is not a good idea.

Plausible[2] has an Open Source self-hostable version but is not so updated in sync with their SaaS version.

Umami[3] is another simple, clean one. And, of course, as many have suggested, Matomo is the other well-established one. If you want to avoid maintaining a hosting routine, a lot do the hosting out of the box these days. PikaPods[4] was good when I tried and played around for a while.

1. https://posthog.com/docs/web-analytics

2. https://github.com/plausible/analytics

3. https://umami.is

4. https://www.pikapods.com

It's super fast and it takes away one more thing to monitor and keep up, it's not as if I'm running an e-commerce site.

But anything smaller than that and analytics are mostly vanity metrics. A lot of the traffic is going to be bots anyway.

Write for pleasure. If you must, look for qualitative signals like discussions of the article on HN or Twitter.