Excellent Non-Google Analytics Option

General Discussion
#1

After some billing problems with Statcounter I was looking around for an alternative and discovered Matomo (formerly known as Piwik). This is a really impressive program and I have just spent the last week setting this up for my clients and exploring it. So, if anyone is looking for a more ethical and Google-free way to collect analytics I can recommend https://matomo.org/. There are two options:

  1. Matomo Cloud which is a subscription service (and way too expensive for me).
  2. Matomo On-Premise which is a self-hosted (free) open source version.

They also have a couple of WordPress plugins. One is a complete Matomo installation (min WP 4.8), and the other is an integration plugin that integrates with your cloud or local version (min WP 5.0 but still seems to work with CP). They are not interested in working with ClassicPress (I asked).

I am using the self-hosted program and didn’t bother with any plugins, just installed the small code snippet in functions.php. Clients have a login access to view their stats. I haven’t used Google Analytics in a while, so not sure how they compare, but there is plenty of information in there to study. It will do daily, weekly or monthly email reports that you can customise.

Worth a look if you haven’t seen it already and would like to break free of Google.

3 Likes
#2

Been using Matomo for years. It’s a great option to replace GA and have full control over your data.

I also recently stumbled upon https://plausible.io/

They have paid cloud option and free open source option. Not as advanced as Matomo but does provide basic analytics and privacy focused.

1 Like
#3

Yep, been using self-hosted Matomo on a VPS for several months. It’s pretty good.

#4

For me, the hardest part of setting it all up was trying to change the font size! (which was tiny)

The styles all come from lots of small less files in different places (core, overridden by Morpheus, overridden by custom), and these get compiled into one big css file when you activate the theme. Took me ages to track them all down.

#5

They do have different themes and you can write your own. Might be a safer bet forking one, so changes don’t get deleted during update.

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#6

Yes, that’s what I ended up doing. I now have a theme called SimplyBig :slightly_smiling_face:

I took a copy of Morpheus, but I also had to add in some other less files from another theme (GTheme I think) to tweak other settings that were coming direct from core.

All the docs about custom themes are aimed at how to change the colour scheme. Font size seems to be considered unimportant.

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#7

Highly recommend Fathom Analytics as an ethical, indie, Google alternative.

1 Like
#8

@Code_Potent - I noticed you asked about this on Slack but thought it would be better to post here. For me Matomo is adding about 1/4 to 1/3 second to the load time.

stats
stats871Ă—37 2.13 KB

stats2
stats21035Ă—38 6.62 KB

2 Likes
#9

I’ve installed Matomo on a few sites to check it out.

I was looking for a simple tracking site so I could see number of visits and page loads. I don’t need anything complicated and this seems to fit the bill.

Only issue I have at the moment is if I enable the noscript option it stops all tracking for that site. I need to look into why that’s happening.