The first thing you have to do when you visit a new site is agree to a cookie policy. Every. Single. Site. And on the odd occasion you don’t have to agree to accept terms, you know the website probably isn’t compliant.
On one hand we all want better analytics – more data. On the other hand, we don’t like the idea of being tracked. Recently I was looking at a buying a new monitor. Across every decide on so many services, the only advert I then saw for a week or two was this for this particular monitor. I understand that this was good business, it was tailored advertising – advertising that works. I understand how technically it could be easily done. But on the other hand, I absolutely hate it.
So I decided when it came to developing my personal website, I wasn’t going to use cookies.
For the most part, this wasn’t going to be an issue, especially as I was going to build the website using Nuxt.js and just use WordPress as a CMS. But the only sticking point I came across was analytics.
Google Analytics uses cookies.
What are the alternatives?
I recently came across Plausable. Plausible Analytics is a simple and privacy-friendly alternative to Google Analytics, that does not use cookies. Of course, the amount of data you’re going to get is limited compared to something like GA4. But it will tell you what you need to know.
In the end, as I was hosting this blog on Netlify, I decided to go with their analytics solution.
It’s DNS-based, meaning that there is no configuration, no tracking users. The data is just enough. Nothing fancy, but everything that you need to know. It’s probably not as good as Plausible Analytics, but I decided to take the easy option.
What cookie-less solutions have you come across?
