My idea concerns was to limit the maintenance work to the minimum, still being effective. But which alternatives are available?
No analytics
✅ Legal Perspective (EU / GDPR / ePrivacy)
Not using tracking tools like Google Analytics can indeed help you avoid needing a cookie consent popup, if:
1. You don’t store or access any non-essential cookies (like tracking or marketing cookies), and
2. You only use essential cookies (e.g., for login, CSRF protection), or no cookies at all.
Under the GDPR and ePrivacy Directive (and national implementations like Italy’s Garante Privacy or Germany’s TTDSG):
• You must obtain consent before using non-essential cookies, including for:
• Google Analytics
• Facebook Pixel
• Personalized ads
• If you don’t use those at all, you can skip the popup legally.
So your minimalist choice is legally sound if you’re truly not using any tracking cookies. That’s often seen as more respectful of user privacy.
📉 Performance Trade-Offs
By skipping analytics, you gain simplicity and user-friendliness, but there are some downsides to consider:
What you lose:
• No insight into how users are finding your site (referrals, keywords, direct visits).
• No understanding of which pages perform well (time on page, bounce rate).
• No way to detect patterns, drop-offs, or common exit points.
What you still keep:
• Performance of the site may actually improve slightly (no tracking scripts).
• Trust from privacy-conscious users may increase.
• Legal risk is minimized — less hassle with cookie banners and third-party data processors.
Non invasive tracking
🔄 Alternative Approaches
If you want basic stats without invasive tracking, consider one of these privacy-friendly analytics tools:
| Tool | GDPR-Friendly? | No Cookie Banner? | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|
| Plausible | ✅ Yes | ✅ Yes | Lightweight, open-source, paid hosting or self-host |
| Umami | ✅ Yes | ✅ Yes | Open-source, self-hosted, clean UI |
| Matomo (self-hosted) | ✅ Yes | ✅ (with config) | More advanced features, heavier setup |
| GoAccess | ✅ Yes | ✅ Yes | CLI-based, analyzes server logs in real-time |
These don’t use cookies or track individuals. Instead, they give you aggregate insights without fingerprinting or storing personal data.
- Plausible, https://github.com/plausible/analytics written in Elixir
- Unami, https://github.com/umami-software/umami is typescript
- Matomo, https://github.com/matomo-org/matomo is PHP+MySQL
- GoAccess, https://github.com/allinurl/goaccess is C language based
Log based stats
Your hosting can provide access log analysis tools, the most commons are:
- AWStats: https://github.com/eldy/AWStats is Perl based
- Webalizer: https://github.com/hyc/webalizer is C language based
From hosting provider prospective
Really with containerised solution the choice should not be guided by the languages. Most of the new tools (plausible, Unami, Matomo, GoAccess) provide Dockerfile to make it ready-to-use. Also Perl has its own image available in docker hub.
A bit more complex can be to deploy Matomo: it also require MySQL instance to run, and this is of course a computing overhead, compared with other solution
🎯 Summary
- Your decision is legally justifiable and user-friendly, as long as you’re cookie-free.
- The trade-off is losing deep user insight — but for many personal or content-focused blogs, this is acceptable.
- If you want basic feedback without legal fuss, Plausible or Umami are excellent options.
- As hosting provider you should select the better tool available, keeping the resource consumption as lower as possible
- As customer you should select your hosting provider based on your need, still agreeing with low carbon footprint
Should your hosting provider stress about it? I think so.
