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You can self-host a free analytics solution like Matomo (formerly called Piwik) [1] and choose whether you're fine analyzing web server logs alone or want to track finer details by injecting JavaScript (provided in the solution) on your pages.

[1]: https://matomo.org/

I've heard a lot of people coming to rely on back-end tracking because it can't be blocked by the client. I think this works especially well on a single page application because you can infer how a user interacted with the site solely based on API calls.

I don't know what the author uses as his blog engine, but I thought pageviews was a part of most blogs. Wordpress certainly does it. You don't need an analytics suite to run a simple counter.