Ask HN: Do you use analytics on your personal blog/site? Why?

My personal site is HTML/CSS only, but I decided to add a privacy-ok simple analytics solution to it [1]. So now it does have some JS on it, but I can live with its <1KB size. By deferring it it's just as fast as before.

I really only use it as a view counter - seeing that there are actually a few readers motivates me.

[1]: https://plausible.io

I use goaccess for analysing my server logs and that's it. I look for pages that are popular, traffic spikes, and any referrals that stand out. There is so much referrer spam these days that it takes a while to clean things up to the point where it's useful.

I do have logs on the server (although the data in the logs is reduced when a "DNT:1" header is present). I do not use any client side analytics at all, and do not want to.

Often I just have plain text files, and direct downloads for other stuff anyways; however, comments can be useful, and if someone has comments, I do have a NNTP server which can be used for discussions about these things.

I think it depends a lot on what your goal is with the personal blog/site. If you want to improve it or gain attention, then analytics will be useful, but if you just want to have it for purely personal reasons than analytics might not help with your goal.

Though, it is still nice when you post an article to know how many people actually read it, but I think this could also be solved by adding a comment section.

I use Google Analytics. Looking at analytics helps me stay motivated as it shows people are actually reading my content

My personal site is html/css only, no js or other frameworks on the pages. I don't count page views but can see bandwidth usage on the free firebase instance I use for it (firebase deploy from cli is my lazy method of pushing).

Personal, no. Yes for everything else.

However, I love seeing feedback and where they come from. I have one project in my resume, and it's become analytics for who actually goes through the resume and when. I saw someone referred from a YC job applicant management dashboard from there, so I know Y Combinator's job network gets good read on my resume at least.

I also noticed that rejections come soon after certain people view my profile on LinkedIn or certain articles, so it's interesting to note what kind of impressions people have of me.