While putting together a directory of software engineering blogs, I stumbled upon an interesting trend. As I scrolled through posts from fellow developers, I found one by Jonathan Snook that really caught my attention. He’d decided to turn off the analytics on his blog to boost performance and, surprisingly, embrace the idea of not knowing who visits his site.
“I have no analytics on my site. I am very much okay with this. As they say, ignorance is bliss.”
– Jonathan Snook
That line got me thinking: I am not the only one thinks about ditching analytics and could I really do it? Could I, too, live in this blissful ignorance?
Curiosity piqued, I dove deeper and found more developers making similar decisions:
“I turned off the Plausible analytics for this site. I used to use analytics mostly to look for links back to my site from other creators.”
– Rach Smith
Then there was Keenan:
“I’m turning off my website analytics because I’m very brave and I promise I truly do not care about the numbers”
– Keenan
It’s funny because, in many ways, I do care about the numbers. I like to know where visitors are coming from. But, at the same time, I’m deeply concerned about user privacy and how much data we really need to collect. The more I thought about it, the more I felt torn. Should I follow in their footsteps and turn off all analytics? Could I give up knowing how people find my content? (If you’ve made it this far, let me know how you found this post in the comments—I’m genuinely curious!)
Analytics Are Not Just About Traffic Trends
It’s easy to think of analytics as just a way to track traffic—where visitors are coming from, what pages they’re viewing, or how long they’re staying. This may be true for a static blog, but analytics can serve a much deeper purpose beyond that.
They’re also a valuable tool for monitoring which endpoints are being accessed, helping to pinpoint potential security vulnerabilities or unusual traffic patterns. Knowing which APIs or routes are being hit more frequently can give insight into the health of your website and reveal if certain areas are under strain or misuse. It’s also useful for debugging—when something breaks, analytics can provide the data needed to retrace steps and identify the root cause quickly.
While I’m scaling back on invasive tracking for the sake of privacy, I still see the value in gathering essential stats to keep my site secure and performant.
So, here’s where I landed
I ditched Google Analytics years ago, and replaced it with a self-hosted version of Matomo across most of my websites. Matomo lets me keep tabs on the essentials without giving all my users’ data to a tech giant. But even that felt like too much for some projects.
On a few of my sites, I’ve gone a step further and ditched analytics altogether in favor of parsing raw access logs with GoAccess. The beauty of this system? No trackers, no invasive scripts—just a simple, static HTML report generated daily with a cron job. It gives me the minimal data I need, and it’s completely privacy-focused.
Here’s a snippet of what I use to create that report:
find /var/log -name 'www.yoursite.co.access.log' ! -name '.gz' -exec cat {} + | goaccess --log-format='%h %^[%d:%t %^] "%r" %s %b "%R" "%u" "%^" response-time=%T' --date-format=%d/%b/%Y --time-format=%T -a -o ~/report.html - 
This solution has grown on me, and I’m seriously considering using it on more projects. It’s lightweight, respects privacy, and still tells me what I need to know—without weighing down my website or my conscience.
So, am I brave enough to fully ditch analytics like Jonathan, Rach, or Keenan? Not entirely, and probably never will (especially on production projects). I am somewhere in the middle on this topic.
