Analytics in a privacy focused world

I recently helped my friend Dean Lewis @veducate with some hosting issues. As part of the testing of this he kindly gave me a login to his WordPress instance. He has been a pretty prolific blogger over the years pumping out an amazing amount of really good content. It also highlighted to me that I didn’t know if anyone was reading my blog as i removed Google Analytics years ago over privacy concerns. I had seen from Myles’s blog that he had done something similar as part of his blog revamp. Myles was using Plausible and seeing as they had a self hosted version of this I decided to give it a whirl.

Install

Luckily for me Truecharts has a prebuilt plausible container so i fired that up and set an ingress entry of plausible.jameskilby.cloud on the container so that it uses my Traefik instance as an entry into my Truenas K3s environment. In my WordPress origin site I added the Plausible plugin and defined the endpoint. The last step was to expose the container to the outside world. To do this I created a public DNS record in Cloudflare and pointed this at an existing Cloudflare tunnel terminating in my Truenas K3s setup.

The entire process took approx 30 mins to setup and Im really pleased with the results.

Plausible real time stats

Update:

I am now happy with this and have decided to make my stats public to show exactly what information I can and can’t see. This can be seen here