Analytics without the surveillance
Practical writing on measuring a website honestly: consent and the law, cookieless measurement, migrating off Google Analytics, and getting numbers you can act on.
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Core Web Vitals: what to measure and what to actually fix
Lab scores and field data measure different things, and only one of them counts for ranking. What each metric means, what causes bad ones, and which fixes are worth the effort.
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Plausible vs Fathom vs self-hosting: the actual trade
All three are cookieless and well built. The decision is not about features, it is about which kind of cost you would rather carry — and that has a clear answer per situation.
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Conversion goals and funnels that tell the truth
Most funnel reports flatter you. Here is how step ordering, attribution windows and revenue rounding quietly inflate the numbers, and how to define goals that survive scrutiny.
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Leaving Google Analytics: a checklist that does not lose anything
The switch itself takes an afternoon. What goes wrong is everything around it: the history, the goals nobody wrote down, and the six weeks you needed both running.
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How much of your traffic is bots, and how to stop counting it
Roughly half of all web traffic is automated. Most analytics tools catch only the bots that identify themselves. Here is what the rest looks like and how to exclude it.
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llms.txt: what it proposes, and whether it does anything yet
A Markdown file at your domain root describing your site to language models. The idea is sound. Adoption is close to zero, and it is worth knowing which of those two facts should drive your decision.
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Analytics for agencies: reporting clients will actually read
A monthly PDF nobody opens is not reporting. What clients want is a link they can check themselves and one number that says whether the work is paying.
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Why your analytics numbers never match
Two tools on the same page will disagree by 10–40%, and neither is broken. Here is every reason why, and which number to trust for which decision.
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A practical robots.txt for AI crawlers
A copy-and-paste file is the easy part. The two rules that catch people out are that named groups replace the wildcard, and that robots.txt is a request rather than an access control.