Migrating all analytics to Plausible across your websites

It has been a while since any of my web properties have used Google Analytics. And it’s not that I don’t like Google on a superficial level.

You might find me promoting Google products on their blog, on their podcast, or at their cloud security conference. My career as a computer hacker. 😛

I have different standards for my own enterprise’s spending and user privacy than my employers or clients do. In those latter cases, the buck doesn’t stop with me. Analytics and reCAPTCHA are plenty effective — my personal hesitancy is not for lack of effectiveness.

It’s using cookies, having to comply with laws around that and tracking, page load impact. General adtech friction.

Almost everyone starts out using Google Analytics on their site, similar to starting out using WordPress. Again neither is outright terrible but you grow, mature, learn. Objectives change.

Most people’s next analytics stop is Matomo. You can self-host for free though there are upsells like heatmaps. Intended as a pretty full and open replacement for GA, just with less cost plus more privacy. Those are migration drivers.

Matomo tracks >=2% of the Internet by some calculations.

My blog policy used to call out we’d track you with either Matomo or Vercel. The latter is my choice of static site host so seemed fine to use their built-in analytics, should it eventually support plain HTML + CSS + JS.

Vercel analytics just support Next.js, Nuxt.js, or Gatsby as of this writing.

One day the stars aligned — Plausible popped up to me on GitHub. I re-reviewed their offering and prices. 10 million views across unlimited sites for $150/month struck me as reasonable. A promise of small, fast, simple tracking.

There’s no need for my own backend infrastructure anymore like there was with self-hosted Matomo. You can self-host Plausible if you want but the mental energy isn’t worth it for me.

Is monthly “sticker cost” higher with this setup? Yes.

However, there are multiple dimensions of cost to consider when making decisions. Like headache from managing some degree of infra, going multiple places for data, and so on. Monetary price isn’t even the most important. Being cheap can turn really expensive.

Everyone is different but for me, sustaining high output is an equation like —

(delegating || outsourcing) && (simplifying || optimizing) ♥

Just paying for Plausible then using it across all my sites yields joy at this time. 🙂

You can learn more here — no affiliate relationship.