Introducing Netlify Analytics

Netlify Analytics: A Simple, Accurate Solution for Website Monitoring

Ever launched a project and wished you'd tracked its performance? Many developers overlook analytics initially, due to concerns about added complexity, page weight, or privacy. Netlify Analytics offers a straightforward solution.

I've personally experienced this oversight. My recent CSS Grid Generator launch lacked analytics, leaving me in the dark about its usage. Netlify Analytics allows retrospective analysis without requiring prior setup. It's a valuable tool, though not a replacement for comprehensive marketing platforms.

A key advantage is its accuracy. Server-side data provides a clear picture of actual server activity, unlike client-side analytics vulnerable to ad blockers (affecting an estimated 15% of users), caching, and other factors.

The Netlify Analytics Dashboard

The dashboard provides a quick overview of key metrics:

Further details are accessible by date:

You'll also find breakdowns of top sources and pages:

A particularly useful feature is "Top Resources Not Found," highlighting broken links and resources. This helped me identify and fix a forgotten broken link on my own site.

This tool is beneficial for personal projects and simplifies the analytics implementation process. However, remember that Netlify hosting is required, and it's a paid feature. Data retention is limited to 90 days (bandwidth) and 30 days (other metrics) for older sites; a 2-day delay in data population may occur after enabling analytics.

Technical Details

The dashboard uses React and Highcharts. Highcharts's ease of use and accessibility features were key factors in its selection over alternatives like d3.js. Its ability to render HTML within SVG elements, combined with excellent documentation, streamlined development.

UI challenges included displaying dates on area charts without cluttering the X-axis. A custom JavaScript callback function, combined with an algorithm to highlight monthly data, improved readability.

Alternative Analytics via Snippet Injection

For third-party analytics, Netlify offers snippet injection in or tags. This is useful for global script inclusion and managing scripts without repo access. Access this via: Site Settings → Build & Deploy → Post processing → Snippet Injection.

Adding Google Analytics, for example, would involve wrapping your code in a <script></script> tag:

  window.dataLayer = window.dataLayer || [];
  function gtag(){dataLayer.push(arguments);}
  gtag('js', new Date());

  gtag('config', 'UA-XXXXX-XX');

You can name your snippets for easy management.

Netlify Analytics provides a convenient, accurate, and relatively simple solution for website monitoring, supplementing or replacing more complex third-party tools.

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