Most websites run Google Analytics. It is free, powerful, and installed on a large share of the web. It also tracks visitors, sets cookies, collects personal data, and creates a consent problem that we do not want to import onto a small business site.

This site uses Plausible Analytics instead. It gives us the site stats we need without tracking visitors, setting cookies, or requiring a consent banner.

What Plausible is

Plausible is a lightweight, privacy-first analytics service. It tells you how many people visited your site, which pages they looked at, where they came from, and what country and device they used. It does this without cookies, without personal data collection, and without cross-site tracking.

The script is under 1 KB. It does not set cookies, does not use localStorage, and does not fingerprint browsers. There is no way to identify an individual visitor, and no way to follow them across sessions or sites.

Plausible is built in Elixir — the same language Leanersoft uses for backend work — which is a minor but genuine point of alignment.

Why not Google Analytics

Google Analytics 4 requires a consent banner under GDPR because it sets cookies and processes personal data. That means every European visitor sees a modal asking them to accept tracking before they can read your content.

Consent banners are not just annoying — they are a legal requirement created by the tracking they enable. Remove the tracking and the banner goes away. This is not a grey area: if your analytics tool does not set cookies or collect personal data, you do not need cookie consent for it.

Beyond compliance, there is a practical problem. Plausible published data showing that roughly 58% of tech-audience visitors block Google Analytics through ad blockers or privacy extensions. For general audiences, the figure is lower — around 15 to 25% — but still significant. If a meaningful portion of your visitors never appear in your analytics, the data is incomplete in a way that undermines its purpose.

Plausible is not blocked by most ad blockers because it does not track users. The data it collects is more complete for the same reason it is more private.

What we measure

Plausible shows us:

  • Page views: which articles and pages get read
  • Referrers: where visitors come from (search, direct, links from other sites)
  • Device and browser: aggregate breakdowns, not individual profiles
  • Country: based on the server processing the request, not on geolocation tracking

We do not see who visited, how long they stayed on any specific page, what they clicked, or where they went next. There are no user profiles, no cohort analysis, no conversion funnels, and no retargeting data.

That is enough. If an article gets read a thousand times and another gets read ten times, we know where to focus. If most visitors come from search, we know SEO matters more than social media. The signal we need does not require surveillance.

The honest cost

Plausible is a paid service. Plans start at €9 per month for up to 10,000 monthly page views. Google Analytics is free because Google monetises the data. Plausible charges money because it does not.

We consider this a reasonable cost. The alternative — free analytics funded by visitor tracking — has a price that visitors pay instead of the site owner. We would rather pay directly.

Transparency

The Plausible dashboard for this site is public — you can see exactly what we collect. Zero cookies, zero personal data, zero external requests beyond the lightweight Plausible script.

If you want the same setup for your own site, Leanersoft can build it.