Google Analytics gives you more metrics than you’ll ever look at, a cookie banner you have to build and maintain, and a data processing agreement with a company whose business model is advertising. For most small sites, none of that trade is worth it. A cookieless, self-hosted analytics tool gets you the metrics you’ll actually check, with none of the compliance overhead.

Why cookieless works for basic analytics

You don’t need to track an individual visitor across sessions to know your traffic is up 30% this month, or that a post you linked from Hacker News is your top referrer. Cookieless tools like Plausible and Umami count visits by hashing IP + user agent + a daily-rotating salt, giving you unique-visitor counts without storing anything that identifies a person across days. No cookie, no consent banner required under GDPR in most interpretations, no cross-site tracking to explain to anyone.

Self-host Umami in about ten minutes

docker run -d \
  --name umami \
  -e DATABASE_URL=postgresql://user:pass@db:5432/umami \
  -e APP_SECRET=$(openssl rand -hex 32) \
  -p 3000:3000 \
  ghcr.io/umami-software/umami:postgresql-latest

Point it at a Postgres instance (a small managed one, or a container alongside it), then add the tracking script to your site:

<script defer src="https://analytics.yoursite.com/script.js"
        data-website-id="your-website-id"></script>

That’s the whole integration. No consent management platform, no cookie preference center.

Plausible if you’d rather not run the database yourself

Plausible’s self-host option is heavier to run (it needs ClickHouse), but their hosted plan is a flat monthly fee with no per-event pricing surprise — worth it if you don’t want another service to maintain on your own infra.

The metrics actually worth checking

Most dashboards bury the three numbers that matter under twenty that don’t. Ignore session duration, bounce rate as a standalone number, and pages-per-session — they’re noisy and rarely actionable for a small site. Check:

Vanity metrics like total pageviews feel good and tell you nothing you can act on. Referrer and top-page data tell you what to do next.

What you give up

No cross-device tracking, no detailed funnel analysis, no remarketing audience export. If you’re running serious paid acquisition and need attribution across a multi-touch funnel, cookieless analytics won’t give you that — you’d need consent-gated GA4 or a proper CDP, with the compliance work that comes with it. For a blog, a small SaaS marketing site, or anything without heavy ad spend behind it, that tradeoff is easy.

The actual win

No cookie banner. Nobody bounces off your site because of a consent popup, and you don’t have to build or maintain one. Set it up once, check three numbers a week, and move on.