One of the reasons for switching this site to Ghost, was to build a lightweight, 'blazing fast' blog and newsletter site. 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. Despite where I spend my working day, I don't need to bring that into every aspect of my online life. 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! Flip back to Plausible and quickly start seeing the data flow into your dashboard.
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.
