One of the reasons for switching this site to Ghost, was to build a lightweight, 'blazing fast' blog and newsletter site. Â I've managed Wordpress sites for years, and whilst I love the flexibility, I've watched sites get bigger and slower until efficiency becomes its own workload.
I also wanted to reduce my reliance on the big tech companies that add fuel to the surveillance capitalism fire. Â Despite where I spend my working day, I don't need to bring that into every aspect of my online life. Â So, as I moved to Ghost I have tried to find solutions for that respect two principles.
Lightweight & Privacy Focused.
For analytics, step forward, Plausible.
Plausible is an open-source tool from an Estonia-based company. Their code is free and open source under a GNU license. I pay a modest subscription to ensure the data I gather remains in control, and is not sold to any third parties.
Implementing Plausible on Ghost
Connecting Plausible to Ghost is simple, even for a no-coder like me, and took just a few mins:
- Setup an account at Plausible, and add your site details:
2. Copy the simple line of code that gets generated to the 'Code Injection' pane on your Ghost settings - in the header section:
3. Hit save and you're done! Â Flip back to Plausible and quickly start seeing the data flow into your dashboard. Â
You can publish the dashboard for your site, and customise the tracking in several ways, but for most people Plausible will by default give you a huge amount of information on your site, and which pages get the most traffic.
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