Saying goodbye to site analytics

When this post goes live, I will have removed analytics from the site. This was largely inspired by a post by Rach Smith, which made me think how necessary it was to check my dashboard only to see that most of my traffic was coming from github and vercel. I wasn’t interacting with any of the visitors the same way that I love interacting with people on mastodon, and so I began to think about how else I could spend the $10 a month I currently pay for the hosted analytics offering from Plausible.

Don’t get me wrong, I believe that Plausible Analytics is a fantastic product. For a business or writer that makes money off of web traffic, many of the metrics would be an invaluable tool to determine where traffic was coming from, and which search terms were leading people to the site in the first place. Since this site will never be monetized, and I write for the people that I love interacting with rather than the masses, analytics just isn’t a good fit. I plan to add that $10 a month to my donation pool that gets sent to open source projects and maintainers, with $2 a month going to Plausible. Again, I believe in the mission of their product, and wish to see it gain market share from Google Analytics.