Visit counts
Count your site's visits with Plausible, Umami or GoatCounter, which keep no cookies, set up in Site Settings, waiting for visitors' agreement where the site asks first.
A Goodfellow site has no server to count visits on, so it counts them with a service that does, in place of pasting a tracking script under Code. Goodfellow sets up three, all of which count visits without cookies and without following visitors from site to site:
- Plausible, a paid service with a free trial, or free software you run on a server of your own.
- Umami, whose Umami Cloud has a free plan, or free software you run on a server of your own.
- GoatCounter, free for sites that aren't businesses' and with a modest number of visits, or free software you run on a server of your own.
Each keeps the counts on its own dashboard, which the admin panel links to; the counts aren't shown in the admin panel itself.
Set it up
- Make an account with the service and add your site there. Each gives you a short piece of code to put on your pages, starting with
<script. - In the admin panel, open Site Settings, then Visit counts.
- Choose the service, and paste its code. You can paste less: Plausible's domain for the site, such as
example.org; Umami's website id; or GoatCounter's code, such asstjosephforstjoseph.goatcounter.com, or the address of a GoatCounter of your own. - If you pasted the newer code Plausible gives each site, with an address ending in
pa-….js, also type the site's domain as Plausible shows it, which names its dashboard. - Choose Start counting. Pages count visits once the site has been rebuilt, a minute or two later.
Open Plausible's dashboard (or Umami's, or GoatCounter's) then opens the service's dashboard in a new tab. Change pastes other code, or chooses another service, and Stop counting takes the script off every page.
Only the service's own script is added, from an https:// address; it never runs in the admin panel, its previews, or goodfellow dev and next dev, so the counts are only real visitors'. "Page not found" isn't counted. On a Next.js site, moving from page to page counts each page, as it does on any other site.
Visitors' consent
On a site that asks visitors before showing content from other sites, counting waits until visitors allow statistics: the notice asks about them on their own, with Choose, and visitors who say no aren't counted. These services keep nothing in visitors' browsers and don't follow them elsewhere, so some places' rules don't ask for agreement to them; where yours don't, turn off Count only visitors who agree, and visits are counted on every page straight away, without the notice asking about them. Whether a site needs to ask depends on where it and its visitors are; check before turning it off, and say what's counted on your privacy page.
On a site that doesn't ask, visits are counted straight away.
Other services
For any other service, such as Google Analytics, paste its code in Site Settings → Code instead, and say what it's for there, so a site that asks visitors waits for the right answer; see Layout and settings.