For me, analytics are useful to track performance, page views and 404’s. Having converted from PHP (WordPress), I’m still seeing lots of accesses to …/index.php which I now redirect to the actual page using Netlify’s excellent redirect capability. I wouldn’t know that those were an ongoing issue without analytics since I don’t get any log files from Netlify.
I don’t really need anything else.
To be honest I think that I am going to turn off analytics from the small projects I manage.
It’s not worth it… serving visitor’s data to 3rd party providers and I hardly ever bother looking at the stats.
If I ever buy a hosting plan again I might go back to AWStats or Server logs.
BTW I’ve looked into IPFS. This project has some big funding from private capital and it is looking into creating a decentralized web that aims to replace the existing WWW.
It’s very ambitious of them and it is far from ready for prime time.
I did the same. I never cared about looking at analytics. I cared about if anyone found any posts interesting and their feedback, but comments are useful for that.
After getting rid of the analytics, my site is so much lighter, and I am also respecting the visitor’s privacy.
This looks like an interesting project. Keep us posted how this implementation goes for you.
Here are 2 alternatives I stumbled across:
Just a note to say that if you front your site with Cloudflare, even the free tier has some really useful analytics that are not intrusive to end users.