The Plausible Blog

Attribution modeling is how marketing teams decide where growth really comes from. In other words, it’s about attributing the touchpoints (specific channels, campaigns, ads, etc.) that led someone to take a desired action (like purchase, sign up, etc.) in your business.

Europe has been building world-class digital tools for years. A major advantage is that many of these tools prioritize privacy and open-source development by default.

Backlinks are when another website (another domain) links back to you.

Plausible has been several years into business. We’re sustainably profitable and solely funded by our subscribers. We have never raised a single dollar from any investor and respectfully, don’t plan on doing so.

If you have spent years working with Google Analytics, switching tools can feel risky. GA4 includes many reports, dimensions, filters and settings. Plausible takes a different approach. You see one clean dashboard that stays simple while still giving you all the insights you need.

For a long time, website owners could collect as much data as they wanted without asking anyone. Nobody had to give consent, nobody questioned tracking, and tools like Google Analytics worked perfectly.

If you’re comparing the data that you see in your Plausible dashboard with another tool you use like Google Analytics 4, Google Search Console, an email provider, Facebook ads, etc., seeing some differences is almost guaranteed.

According to multiple users’ reports, the referral traffic from ChatGPT has been declining since July 21 and more so after 7 August (i.e. the launch of GPT-5).

User behaviour keeps evolving. This means many things that used to resonate five or ten years ago, won’t now. For instance, a few years ago, it was normal to visit homepages of news outlets and now most of us prefer algorithm-curated, bite-sized news over full articles.

The traffic you see in Google Analytics could contain bots (or non-human traffic to be more precise). We tested by simulating bot traffic to a test site. Google Analytics recorded it as real traffic. Plausible Analytics rejected it all.

If you are trying to measure and analyze the activities on your Shopify store, you can use the in-built Shopify Analytics, and pair/replace it with Google Analytics or simpler, powerful and privacy-friendly alternatives like Plausible Analytics.

Imagine logging into Google Analytics. You want to see how your page from last month is performing – how much time does a visitor spend on average on your page. It’s 10 seconds. You end up spending marketing resources, you make strategies for improving your site’s engagement time.

☝️That’s a screenshot from the publicly open Plausible Analytics dashboard of the European Alternatives website, featuring independent, privacy-friendly digital tools.

Scroll depth tracking has always been a crucial metric for businesses, marketers, and site owners. It helps you see how far users scroll down a page, and understand the content performance, engagement levels, and areas for improvement.

If you are noticing your website traffic is down, the first thing to do is investigate the reasons. Don’t panic, you were probably hit by a Google’s core update, something maybe off on the technical side, the site may be responding to a new trend, or you may simply need to write more/better content.

It’s an interesting time to be an online business, catching up with rapidly shifting “trends” regarding AI, increasing concerns around consumer privacy, and the one you can’t miss: shifting SEO –– one of the most favourite channels of digital marketers for more than two decades.

Different businesses or teams have unique goals, workflows, and preferences for tracking and visualizing their data. For marketers and marketing agencies, creating custom dashboards is crucial to help clients visualize and understand their data. One powerful tool for this purpose is Looker Studio by Google.

You can track almost any activity you want on your site with modern web analytics tools. And the process has only gotten simpler during the last decade.

In 2024, the Plausible website saw a ~2,200% increase in referral traffic from four AI search engines: ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude, and Phind (refer to the screenshot above). These numbers were in the 100’s in 2023.

The Google Analytics 4 interface has multiple reports, beneath multiple layers of menus. Some reports are standard, i.e. pre-made and available by default, while others are custom (“Explorations”) that you need to create on your own from scratch.

If you run paid campaigns on Google, Bing, Instagram, any newsletters, or even sponsored videos, etc., to drive sales or other conversion actions like sign-up, it’s a good idea to integrate an analytics tool. This helps fill blind spots about what was actually done on the website after someone clicked on your ad.

When you first see your bounce rate of x%, it can be confusing making you think about what it is, is it good to have a higher or lower bounce rate, how is it being calculated for my site, what are some industry benchmarks, what can I do to improve it, etc. Let’s answer all questions.

Having a website means having landing pages and tracking the traffic and performance of pages can bring great amounts of marketing and business insights.

Most of the time, we visit a site or a blog with a goal (or at least intent) in mind. Imagine you’re searching for home workout ideas and land on a fitness blog with hundreds of unorganized posts. You were likely looking for something specific, like “yoga for beginners” or “quick cardio routines.”

TL;DR:

Tracking the performance of your WooCommerce store doesn’t have to be complicated. In fact, it’s incredibly straightforward with the Plausible plugin for WordPress, allowing you to set up end-to-end ecommerce site monitoring with just one click.

You’ve probably seen those pop-ups on websites, sweetly offering you cookies. Those are cookie consent banners.

As a business with an online presence, you’ll almost definitely have, at least one of, a SaaS application, a blog, an online store, product documentation, or anything table stakes such as these.

Whether you’ve recently added a new tracking snippet to your site or have reasons to believe that your website analytics might not be functioning properly, it’s a good idea to verify if your analytics setup is correctly installed.

Navigating a Google Analytics account gives me tiny shots of anxiety. The sentiment is always: “Why is GA4 so bad?” It makes me think “What if I do something wrong?”, “What if I end up changing a setting?” or “How do I apply a metric to this report now?”.

Web analytics, as the name suggests, came around for helping website-owners visualize data about different elements of their website. This’d help them optimize web usage.

An e-commerce website has various ways of earning sales. Customers can find you through your ads, email campaigns, social campaigns, SEO, directly visiting your website and more. The process of understanding which channels are the most effective for your e-commerce store to generate sales is known as ecommerce revenue attribution.

Web analytics tools like Google Analytics or Plausible provide basic information, but they can’t automatically track everything you need. Custom dimensions allow you to capture specific data that goes beyond standard metrics.

If you have downloadable files on your website, such as PDFs, eBooks, apps, brochures, etc., and are curious about how they are performing, i.e. which files were downloaded, from where on your website, by which audience, etc., then it can be done using analytics tools like Google Analytics, a privacy-friendly alternative like Plausible, or other methods.

Funnels have been around ever since digital marketing wasn’t even a thing. Earlier developed as a technique for door-to-door salespersons to describe their product, it evolved to become many things, and even changed shapes in response to the evolving customer journeys.

Quick update: Google announced recently that they are delaying the phasing out of third-party cookies. This is an effort to buy time to balance out the advertising industry’s needs and that of privacy advocates. This buys advertisers some time, but the phase-out (in whatever shape it comes) is still around the corner. It’s useful to prepare for this eventuality. Let’s see how, below.

Quick update: Google announced recently that they are delaying the phasing out of third-party cookies. This is an effort to buy time to balance out the advertising industry’s needs and that of privacy advocates. This buys marketers some time, but the phase-out (in whatever shape it comes) is still around the corner. It’s useful to prepare for this eventuality. Let’s see how, below.

In this article, Steffen Gross, an experienced data protection expert and lawyer at Simpliant Legal PartG mbB and external data protection officer at Simpliant GmbH, explains how web analytics can be implemented in accordance with the strict requirements of the ePrivacy Directive and the GDPR.

TL;DR: We’re introducing the “free as in beer”, self-hosted and AGPL-licensed Plausible Community Edition (CE). Installation instructions are here.

Is Google Analytics illegal? Yes, say the Austrian, French, Italian, Danish, Finnish, Norwegian, Swedish and other European Data Protection Authorities. Here’s why.

Are you considering migrating from Universal Analytics to Google Analytics 4 but are unsure about the differences between the two and how to succeed with the transition?

We’ve reached a significant milestone of $1 million in annual recurring revenue (ARR) with Plausible Analytics, a simple, lightweight, open source and privacy-friendly alternative to Google Analytics.

Google just dropped big news on the business and marketing world! Universal Google Analytics, the current version of Google Analytics, will be sunset and will stop counting stats on July 1st 2023. The new Google Analytics 4 will be replacing Universal Analytics.

We’ve had an amazing journey to date. It took us 324 days to reach $400 in monthly recurring revenue (MRR) since we got our first paying subscriber on May 14 2019. Then things got a bit crazy.

There are several privacy concerns with running Google Analytics but there are worries about data accuracy too. How much data is missing from Google Analytics due to adblockers and privacy-friendly browsers?

We’ve grown from less than 100 subscribers to more than 4,000 subscribers since April 2020. With all this success also comes a growing volume of support requests.

Google is rolling out a significant change as a part of their page experience ranking algorithm in June 2021.

As a site owner, you’ve probably heard about Google’s page experience update and the introduction of Core Web Vitals but what does it all mean?

It’s a new way of evaluating whether a site is providing a great user experience. If your site meets the threshold, it could benefit from a ranking boost in Google’s search results.

Here’s a summary of all the things you need to know.

1. What is the page experience update and the Core Web Vitals?
2. What sites may be at risk?
3. Core Web Vitals and other page experience signals
   1. Mobile friendliness
   2. Safe browsing
   3. HTTPS security
   4. Intrusive interstitials
   5. Largest Contentful Paint (LCP)
   6. First Input Delay (FID)
   7. Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS)
4. How many sites on the web pass the Core Web Vitals?
5. What tools can I use to check my core web vitals?
   1. Google Search Console
   2. Google PageSpeed Insights
6. How can I improve my page speed and pass core web vitals?
   1. Reduce the number of elements
   2. Resize and compress all the images
   3. Implement lazy loading and facades
   4. Replace heavy features with lightweight alternatives
   5. How does Google Analytics impact your core web vitals?

What is the page experience update and the Core Web Vitals?

Page experience is a set of signals Google uses to measure the real-world user experience of a website. Security, loading performance, visual stability, mobile-friendliness and interactivity are some of the factors they look at.

Unlike Google’s other initiatives such as AMP pages and FLoC, the idea of page experience and Core Web Vitals is a sensible approach that will make the web a faster, more efficient and more secure place.

There are three brand-new Core Web Vitals benchmarks within the page experience signals and these will start rolling out as a part of the Google ranking algorithm beginning in mid-June 2021 and will be fully in place by the end of August 2021.

Your individual pages will get a label of either “Good”, “Needs Improvement” or “Poor” for each of the Core Web Vitals. If your site meets the minimum threshold (score “Good”) for all the Core Web Vitals, it could get a potential SEO ranking boost and more traffic from Google’s search results.

What sites may be at risk?

What happens if your site scores badly on the web vitals benchmarks? Google has repeatedly stated that sites should “not expect drastic changes” and that page experience is just one of the many factors they use in their algorithm.

So having bad scores doesn’t necessarily mean that you won’t rank at all or that your site will be excluded from the search results. The page experience update is only a small part of hundreds of different signals that Google uses to determine their rankings.

These sites may be at risk:

• Sites that don’t use HTTPS
• Sites that don’t have a mobile friendly design
• Sites with security issues such as malware
• Sites that block their content from being seen by using paywalls and similar elements
• Sites that rely on a large number of intrusive banner ads, popups and other calls to action
• Heavy and slow sites that frustrate the visitor and that are not optimized for speed

So even though you may not get more visitors from Google, the main benefit of meeting Core Web Vitals benchmarks is to provide a faster, safer and better user experience for your site visitors and have a website that uses less electricity and has a lower carbon footprint.

Core Web Vitals and other page experience signals

Core Web Vitals are combined with other page experience signals to measure the user experience on your website, how people experience the speed, responsiveness and visual stability of your website.

Here’s the complete list of all the signals Google uses as part of the page experience algorithm:

Mobile friendliness

The majority of people experience the web through smaller screens and mobile devices. Your website should be optimized for mobile devices.

Google’s search algorithm favors sites that use the responsive design that adapts itself to the size of the screen. Here’s a test tool you can use to determine your site’s mobile friendliness.

Safe browsing

Google is checking the websites for malware and other security issues. Content that is found to be potentially dangerous can be flagged with a warning label in search results and a warning page in the browser when someone tries to visit the page.

Google will inform the site owner about any potential security issues using the Google Search Console and you can read more here for further details on what steps you can take to protect your site.

HTTPS security

Google is pushing sites to start using SSL certificates to provide a more secure browsing experience. Chrome browser is flagging sites that don’t use SSL and the search algorithm gives a boost to sites that use SSL.

With outstanding projects such as Let’s Encrypt available, it is now simple for all sites to use HTTPS and encrypt the data exchanged.

Intrusive interstitials

Intrusive interstitials are popups, paywalls, full-page advertising banners and other website elements that block the page for a visitor which leads to a bad user experience. Google prefers not to send search traffic to sites that block the content.

Note that some elements such as cookie popups and GDPR consent notices are not included in this.

As a side note, those legal banners are also required not to be in the form of consent walls that obstruct the content. According to the GDPR legislation, the consent notices should not obstruct the content of the page and should allow visitors to view the content even when they don’t want to interact with the notice.

Google has published more details on what type of interstitials are not welcome.

Largest Contentful Paint (LCP)

Largest Contentful Paint (LCP) is the first of the three Core Web Vitals. It measures the loading speed of the content on a website. People are impatient on the web and tend to close the slow loading sites.

Here’s how Google defines LCP:

The Largest Contentful Paint (LCP) metric reports the render time of the largest image or text block visible within the viewport, relative to when the page first started loading.

The initial benchmark for the Largest Contentful Paint (LCP) has been set at 2.5 seconds.

Google plans to update the signals and benchmarks on a yearly basis in order to “further align with evolving user expectations and increase the aspects of user experience that we can measure”.

First Input Delay (FID)

First Input Delay (FID) is the second of the three Core Web Vitals. It measures how responsive your page is and how quickly visitors can interact with your page after landing.

Here’s how Google defines FID:

FID measures the time from when a user first interacts with a page (i.e. when they click a link, tap on a button, or use a custom, JavaScript-powered control) to the time when the browser is actually able to begin processing event handlers in response to that interaction.

The initial benchmark for the First Input Delay (FID) has been set at 100 milliseconds.

Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS)

Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS) is the final of the three Core Web Vitals. It measures visual stability and the unexpected layout shifts a visitor is experiencing on your site.

Website elements suddenly moving and shifting position as other elements are being loaded leads to a confusing and frustrating visitor experience that may result in accidental clicks. Google wants to promote a more stable website experience.

Here’s how Google defines CLS:

CLS measures the sum total of all individual layout shift scores for every unexpected layout shift that occurs during the entire lifespan of the page. A layout shift occurs any time a visible element changes its position from one rendered frame to the next.

The initial benchmark is that websites should maintain a Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS) of less than 0.1.

How many sites on the web pass the Core Web Vitals?

Screaming Frog has analyzed 20,000 websites and discovered that 12% of sites on mobile and 13% on desktop meet the Core Web Vitals assessment.

Another report by iProspect looked at 1,500 sites and found that 21% of sites meet the benchmarks.

The First Input Delay vital is pretty much a non-existent issue for the vast majority of sites but many seem to struggle with Cumulative Layout Shift and Largest Contentful Paint.

So if your site is meeting all the benchmarks and provides a fast and quick-loading user experience, you are in the minority!

What tools can I use to check my core web vitals?

Great place to check your Core Web Vitals and get your real-world measurement scores is using the tools that Google has created:

Google Search Console

Google Search Console scores your pages with “Good”, “Needs Improvement” or “Poor” based on the real-world data. It identifies pages that are not meeting the Core Web Vitals benchmarks and that require your attention.

In the “Experience” section of the Search Console, you have access to the reports on the “Page Experience”, “Core Web Vitals” and the “Mobile Usability”.

This is the quickest way to identify any issues on your site as measured by real-world data and get the summary straight from the horse’s mouth.

Google PageSpeed Insights

PageSpeed Insights gives you access to both the Field Data (real-world data that comes from visitors) and the Lab Data (provides the data on how the users may experience a website).

The field data comes from the Chrome UX Report which takes the data from actual people that use the Chrome browser. The lab data comes from Google’s Lighthouse tool which allows you to audit and assess your sites in the lab environment.

One benefit of using PageSpeed Insights is that you can get the scores of any website on the web rather than only getting the scores of sites that you manage. Take a look at Google PageSpeed Insights.

How can I improve my page speed and pass core web vitals?

The advice to improve your core web vitals score is very similar to the advice on how to speed up your page in general. Plausible website itself hasn’t been optimized for the core web vitals but it still scores well because we have optimized for speed even before web vitals were a thing.

So put speed as one of your top priorities when building a website. Here are some things you can consider:

Reduce the number of elements

“Keep request counts low and transfer sizes small” is one of the main recommendations from Google. Another one is to “minimize third-party usage”.

Every single design element or feature that you add to your site adds additional footprint. Images, auto-playing videos, fonts, live chat, analytics, social media sharing buttons, pop-ups or banner advertising.

Your task is to analyze and understand all the requests your website is making. What is the purpose of each individual request? Can you and your visitors live without some of these? Then remove and eliminate all the unnecessary elements.

Resize and compress all the images

“Properly size images” and “Serve images in next-gen formats” are two of Google’s recommendations.

By resizing and compressing images that you use, you can dramatically reduce your page weight without any noticeable difference to your visitors. You can also serve images in next-gen formats such as WebP.

Implement lazy loading and facades

If you still have many elements on your site, you can improve the performance by lazy loading. Google recommends to “Defer offscreen images”.

So rather than loading all the resources as soon as the page loads, you load them as the visitor scrolls down the page or you put a facade in place of an element and only load the element itself if the visitor interacts with it.

Some browsers now lazy load images by default but not all. And you can go even further and lazy load additional elements of your site. Google also recommends to “lazy load third-party resources with facades”.

Replace heavy features with lightweight alternatives

If you cannot live without some specific features, try and find more lightweight alternatives. Some examples:

• Google Fonts can be replaced with web safe fonts
• YouTube videos that autoplay can be replaced with a no-cookie embed alternative (switch the domain to youtube-nocookie.com) or a facade that requires a click to play
• Google Analytics (135KB gzipped) can be replaced with Plausible Analytics which is 2.5KB. Use our script size calculator to see how much that saves across your traffic.

Identify heavy and slow elements of your site and go on a hunt for more appropriate and lightweight alternative solutions.

How does Google Analytics impact your core web vitals?

I did some tests using PageSpeed Insights on my own site to see how web analytics impact the core web vitals scores.

Here’s the test with Plausible Analytics installed:

And with Google Analytics installed:

Pretty much overall the scores for core web vitals are a bit worse with Google Analytics but all still within the “Good” benchmark. First Contentful Paint goes from 1.3 seconds to 1.7 seconds and Largest Contentful Paint goes from 1.8 seconds to 2 seconds. Speed Index itself slows down from 2.2 seconds to 2.7 seconds.

My score stays on 100 for the desktop test but drops from 100 to 97 for mobile. My site is optimized so this drop when using Google Analytics doesn’t look too bad. For a site that’s on the line between “Good” and “Needs improvement”, adding Google Analytics could be the final straw that ruins the score. These scores can turn bad quickly if you add even one heavy element.

Interestingly enough, Google PageSpeed Insights flags Google Analytics in the “Avoid long main-thread tasks” recommendation:

Google is starting to track your site visitors for advertising purposes even when you’re not using Google Analytics or having any relationship with Google.

Started your WordPress site, published some posts and now want to get some stats to figure out how you’re doing? It’s time to install a WordPress plugin for web analytics.

We’ve made it to $10,000 MRR with Plausible! Several people asked about our lessons learned, so I wanted to share some in this post.

Plausible Analytics is the first open source project I’ve been involved in as a developer and maintainer. And what a great journey it has been until now.

Having 404 error pages on your website can lead to a bad user experience, a negative first impression, and even damage your search engine rankings and traffic you get from SEO.

Outbound links play a significant role on the open web, but how do you track clicks on outbound links using your website analytics? Here’s a guide on how to automate external link click tracking on your site using Google Analytics and Plausible Analytics. Let’s get started.

TL;DR: If you collect personal data or use cookies, a privacy policy is legally required. If you don’t, you should still have one to show visitors you take their privacy seriously.

We experienced big growth in October, breaking our traffic and signup records once again. These numbers can be attributed to Marko who published three articles that landed on the front page of Hacker News. Here are the stats from last month:

Plausible Analytics is a software as a service open source web analytics project. With the increase in popularity of Plausible in recent months, we’ve become aware that there are risks associated with permissive open source licenses that corporations that don’t care about open source are happy to take advantage of.

Plausible seems to be settling into a more steady rate of growth. I had to double our server capacity in late September to accommodate the new trial signups and customers. Here are the stats from last month:

UTM parameters help you understand where your traffic is coming from. They can illuminate dark traffic, track paid campaigns and pinpoint which content drives results.

Apple has declared privacy a “fundamental human right” and now they’re putting their money where their mouth is, and doing something about it. Apple’s Safari 14 browser and its Privacy Report names, shames and prevents websites that use cross-site trackers to profile web users.

Plausible Analytics is a simple, lightweight, privacy-first and open-source web analytics. We reject, exclude and say no to the majority of the best marketing practices for growing a startup.

The recap for this month is a week late because I just got back from holiday. I’ve been working on Plausible pretty much non-stop all this year so it felt great to take a breather. We still got a lot done in August:

We’ve just had a successful Product Hunt launch for Plausible Analytics. More than 850 upvotes, more than 100 comments, featured twice on the official Twitter account and in the daily and weekly newsletters too.

Plausible Analytics is a simple, lightweight, open source and privacy-friendly web analytics tool. We’re a SaaS startup with subscriptions as a business model.

This last month I’ve been able to get into a nice groove with development. We added a couple of new metrics that should help customers understand their traffic better.

Google’s Chrome browser is the most popular web browser. It has a market share of more than 70%. Whatever new policy Chrome implements will have an affect on all websites as chances are the majority of your visitors use Chrome too.

The last few months have been remarkable for Plausible Analytics. We got more than 180,000 visitors in this period which is a 2,200% increase compared to the prior period. We also saw 10x more trial signups and a 690% increase in subscribers.

California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) is a Californian privacy law that has been inspired by the European General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) but it also differs from it in several ways.

This post announced our move to EU infrastructure in 2020. For a current overview of our EU hosting setup, see our EU hosting page.

June was easily the best month of all time for Plausible. We added some large customers and had our biggest revenue growth ever, both in absolute ($) and relative (%) terms.

What’s the difference between server logs such as AWStats and JavaScript-based web analytics such as Google Analytics? Are client side or server side analytics more accurate? And which should I use on my website? Let’s take a look.

Many open source projects are terribly under-resourced and under-funded. Some open source developers even have to sacrifice their financial security to work on their passion.

Plausible Analytics has been open source since September 2019 but we haven’t offered a convenient way for people to host the code on their own infrastructure. There’s always been a strong interest from the community to self-host the code.

Let’s take a look at the meaning of GDPR, how it impacts web analytics, whether you can take any steps to make Google Analytics GDPR compliant and also explore our GDPR compliant Google Analytics alternative.

Last month we joined Adam Stacoviak and Jerod Santo over at changelog.com to talk about Plausible Analytics.

Another month, another update. Here’s what went down with Plausible in May:

Are you confused about using Google Analytics on your website, the cookies and the requirement to show the cookie consent banner to your visitors? And can you have a cookieless web analytics alternative to Google Analytics? This post is here to figure it all out. Let’s get started.

April 2020 was by far the most successful month in Plausible’s history. Here are the highlights from the last month:

Over the last few weeks, we’ve been in touch with many different website owners who are considering our Google Analytics alternative product. I’ve been surprised by the number of people who have asked something along these lines:

Google Analytics is the largest web analytics platform. 84% of sites that use a known web analytics provider, use Google Analytics to track their visitors and get website statistics.

We recently relaunched Plausible Analytics as a no-cookie, GDPR compliant alternative to Google Analytics. We had some very eventful days and here’s what we learned.

We are working on a leaner and more transparent alternative to Google Analytics. It’s called Plausible Analytics and it comes without all the privacy baggage. Here’s a look at some of the issues with Google Analytics.

March has been one of the weirdest months in my life. I had a week-long holiday in France just before most countries went into lockdown due to the coronavirus outbreak. I flew back to Estonia 2 days before the borders were closed. Having flown through Geneva airport, I had to strictly self-quarantine for 14 days.

As promised, here’s another monthly update on building Plausible. February was a really good month:

I haven’t been regular with updates on how Plausible is doing, but I intend to put more effort into this blog this year. Let’s kick things off with the highlights for January 2020:

If you’re running a website with Google Analytics installed, you may be wondering how it affects the privacy of your website’s visitors. There’s a growing distrust towards the digital advertising sector but what are the actual issues besides calling out ‘creepy’ ads? Let’s discuss the wider ethical questions around personal data collection and digital targeting.

One of the main reasons I started Plausible was to provide a more transparent alternative to Google Analytics. I believe that people should be able to control and know about their data, instead of having it sold to the advertisers behind their back.

If you’ve ever had to develop transactional HTML emails with slick designs, you’ll know that it’s a complete mess. The incompatibilities between email clients are way worse than what you see with different browsers. Testing emails is extremely difficult, and there’s a seemingly endless number of problems with various clients.

I spent the second half of June back home in Estonia to recharge my batteries and reconnect with family+friends. Summer solstice is a huge celebration in Estonian culture so everyone seems to be on holiday at the moment, enjoying nature, good food and drinks. I haven’t had as much time for Plausible as I normally do, but I’m totally OK with that.

For more than a decade I used a variety of products made by Google. Their products and services are reliable, intuitive, and often free to use. Like many other programmers, I really looked up to the company and followed their rapid rise to one of the biggest companies in the world.

It’s been 4 months since I wrote about the analytics tool I want. My idea was to create an alternative for Google Analytics that simplifies the UI and enhances the privacy of online tracking.

Solo founders and makers often have a dilemma: when communicating with customers, should I describe myself as I or we? It’s tempting to use a royal we, even if you’re working on a product alone:

The meteoric rise of front-end frameworks like React, Angular, Vue.js, Elm, etc. has made single-page applications ubiquitous on the web. For many developers, these have become part of their ‘default’ toolset. When they start a new project, they grab the tools they know already: a REST API on the backend, and a React/Angular/Vue/Elm frontend.

This week, I worked on some under-the-hood improvements to Plausible to give me better insights into my userbase. One of these was to store a last_seen timestamp for all users. This is a private piece of data that I use to determine:

• How many users are actively logging on and checking their analytics
• What is the average usage frequency of Plausible?
• When should I consider an account as ‘rotting’? Meaning I’m about to lose them as a user/customer

In general I don’t think that the tech stack matters too much for software projects. Especially if you’re a solo maker, almost all of the risk is on the sales and marketing side as opposed to the tech side. The best approach is normally to just pick some boring tools and start solving your customers’ problems.

Working on plausible.io I often find myself doing things I have no clue how to do. I struggle massively with marketing, copywriting, and most of all, UX/UI design. Here are some tips I’ve found helpful when trying to design for the web as an unimaginative developer who hasn’t designed a single thing in his life.

While working on Gigride, our marketing head asked me to integrate Google Analytics for our landing page. My first thought was: