Switching from Netlify to SimpleAnalytics

I moved my web analytics for PageWatch, my blog and some personal projects to Simple Analytics.

I wanted a simple, privacy focused analytics platform (no cookie banners!), and initially tried Netlify Analytics (since most of my sites are hosted there)

For starters it worked out well: There is no setup required, and Netlify will even backfill old data for you (data they collected from their server logs before you enabled analytics).

I quickly ran into a few issues:

Netlify Analytics is functional but a bit limited

Cost: Netlify analytics is $9/month, per site. That is cheap if you have just a few sites, but I have quite a few, and most hardly generate any traffic. SimpleAnalytics on the other hand is $19/month for unlimited sites.

Limited Data: Netlify only shows me the top 5 referral sources, in contrast to SimpleAnalytics where I can drill down much more, as well as see Twitter posts and other social data.

Netlify reports nearly all traffic going to /

No SPA support: This is kind of ironic seeing that Netlify is often used to host SPA's. For PageWatch, Netlify reported nearly all the traffic as going to the top level page, which isn't even a valid destination.

Switching to SimpleAnalytics

SimpleAnalytics promises to be simple, privacy focused with all the essentials, and so far it has delivered.

Installing is simple, you just have to add a single line of code to your site.

This blog is built on Gridsome, and there was even plugin available:

$ npm install gridsome-plugin-simple-analytics
# then simply add the following settings
module.exports = {
  plugins: [
    {
      use: 'gridsome-plugin-simple-analytics'
    }
  ]
}

Made by another IndieHacker

SimpleAnalytics is a small but growing project, and I like to support other makers whenever I can.

PageWatch Dashboard. Hopefully one day the graph will look more impressive

Originally published at https://blog.pagewatch.dev/post/switching-from-netlify-to-simpleanalytics