It's interesting to note that the website content itself for this article is 5,045 bytes (HTML + CSS), but the analytics code (firebase-analytics.js) is 26,458 bytes, and firebase-app.js (whatever this is?) is 19,865 bytes.
Not a criticism; analytics is important & maybe the app JS is too. Just think it's worth bearing in mind that it's really easy to blow out your website's total delivery impact to users by several times with third party includes.
A lot of times they're not. If you don't have a product, and you're not trying to sell anything, consider the possibility that you just don't need it.
All those things can be gathered from the initial request if you can set a cookie on the user's machine using a cookie header. If you're Firebase then you'd need a request for firebase-analytics.js to set the cookie, but the file itself could be empty.
Also useful to know what fraction of your users are recurring versus new users to tell whether people actually return to your site or if they just check it out once.
Once the cookie is set you can get all this from the server side logs.
Lastly, the refer stats can help you figure out what other sites and communities are interested in your project so that you can further engage with them.
Referers, if they're available at all, come in an HTTP header so once again server side logs would give you this data.
There is no reason to serve any JS for logging unless you want browser fingerprinting data like the user's window size. If your analytics script is more than 0kb then you're tracking people.
Remember awstats and jwstats?
But it doesn't take 50 kB of JS to be able to do that!
Also, believing a page is better because I spend 10 minutes on it rather than 5 is nonsensical. Am I reading everything (good) or am I hunting around for some piece content and not finding it (bad)?
Time on page is a stupid metric that doesn't measure anything useful.
It's not like this data gives you an immediate and perfect readout of the user's entire brain, but it's not useless either.
If you collect information about how often a user is moving their mouse and scrolling the page in order to tell how long someone has been on a page then you've moved from collecting what's useful to collecting everything you can just in case it's useful. That decision comes at the cost of invading everyone's privacy, and that needs to stop.
I'm working on Plausible Analytics which is only 1.4 KB right now and provides a modern dashboard. It also doesn't use cookies and doesn't collect personal data so you're not required to show the cookie/GDPR prompts which would make tiny websites much less tiny.
There's an issue on our Github which will help us perhaps reduce it to under 1 KB too. We're working on that https://github.com/plausible-insights/plausible/issues
> "Plausible does not use cookies and does not collect any personal data. This makes us compliant with the different cookie laws and privacy regulations. It means that you are not required to annoy your visitors with a cookie notice if you’re using Plausible analytics." [1]
> "Compliant with privacy regulations: Google Analytics places cookies and collects a lot of data from your visitors. You’re required to have a privacy policy, to show a cookie banner and to obtain consent for GDPR. Plausible Analytics doesn’t use cookies and doesn’t track personal data so you don’t need to annoy your visitors or worry about those prompts." [2]
It would seem you are collecting PII and processing it server side (?), e.g. calculate_fingerprint here [3].
Care to explain how that doesn't require user consent?
[1] https://plausible.io/data-policy#plausible-is-compliant-with...
[2] https://plausible.io/blog/blog-post-changed-my-startup#new-p...
[3] https://github.com/plausible-insights/plausible/blob/master/...
Instead of setting a cookie with a unique user ID, we simply count the number of unique IP addresses that accessed your website to determine the visitor count.
To enhance the visitor privacy, we don’t actually store the raw visitor IP address in our database or logs. We run it through a one-way hash function to scramble the raw IP addresses and make them impossible to recover.
To further enhance visitor privacy, we add the website domain to their IP hash. This means that the same user will never have the same IP hash on two different websites. If we didn’t do this, the hash would effectively act like a third-party (cross-domain) cookie.
Network Address Translation allows many unique users to share the same public IP address. For this reason we also add the User-Agent string to the hash, although we don’t store the actual User-Agent string.