Evan Genest's Learning Log

These are notes to myself. If you discover them and find them useful I would love to hear from you. Most of these are related to travel I did, books I read, or tech notes for Matomo and the LAMP stack.


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De-Google With the Creators of Plausible

web analytics

These are notes summarizing Episode 396 of the Changelog podcast: De-Google-ing your website analytics with Marko Saric & Uku Täht.

How lightweight are Analytics? A comparison of the script loaded by each:
Google analytics JS file: 47kB
Matomo analytics JS file: 20 kB
Plausible analytics JS file: 1kB

GDPR compliance: of the above, only Plausible is cookie-free. BUT this means it cannot do the real UX analysis tasks: heat maps, session recording. Plausible also anonymizes more things: visitor ID and IP address are both anonymized.

(Plausible is too stripped down...seems like a good use case for lots of things that are developed by teams of one or two people. Any larger team would benefit from site insights from Matomo.)

Alternatives to Google products

reCAPTCHA

VisualCaptcha
Honeypot
hCaptcha
Akismet Wordpress plugin

Google Analytics

Matomo
Plausible

Google fonts

Download and self host from Google
Use web safe fonts

Youtube

Vimeo
PeerTube

Google Maps

OpenStreetMap
Leaflet
Mapbox

Anonymize IP addresses

[use this code](https://support.google.com/ analytics/answer/2763052?hl=en)