I’m going to build a simple WordPress website (mostly focused on the blog) and am thinking about how I do it in terms of privacy respecting. I detest those emails that people send out that track when and how many times I open them, what I click on, etc., so I don’t want to do that. I also don’t particularly care to have Google Analytics on my website and certainly won’t have any kind of FaceBook connectivity. Whilst I don’t want to snoop on visitors, nor do I want individually identifying data, I figure its probably useful to know something about what is the most popular content etc.
I’m wondering what others do with respect to this, including Techlore. Are there plugins, apps and services (including email lists) that anyone could recommend?
Where do you live and where is the host of the website?
If you live for example in germany, you must collect and store the IP of visitors and what they have done on your site (no mousclick analytcs more like: which post did they post, when did they visit your site etc.) including the timestamp for I think seven days. Look up the exact time yourself, since I might confuse it with my countrys law.
I highly recommend StartMail. It’s a privacy-focused email provider that doesn’t track your emails or gather personal data. StartMail offers encryption and adheres to strict privacy standards, so you won’t have to worry about collecting personal information from your subscribers.
Ah, just recently had this problem! A person from the newspaper we write wanted to see page analytics, but I didn’t want to use Google Analytics or any other big analytics company.[1] My solution to this was Umami, which was extremely easy to self host and doesn’t collect a ton of information on visitors. I highly recommend checking out the Github repo below, which has a list of privacy respecting web analytics with their features & price.
I didn’t want to use them in part because it would contribute and encourage them profiting off the collection of users. Furthermore, it would increase cross-site tracking and Google’s monopoly on that. Plus, I didn’t need the extreme drill down that gives you info on each and every visitor. ↩︎
The old fashioned way that websites collected usage data prior to Google Analytics was to examine the web server log file. That typically has the time of the request, the IP address the request came from, the page/file(s) requested, if they were successfully served, and the information the browser claimed about itself. They might, if the browser gave it, have the referrer page that the user came from.
There was at one time some open source scripts that could format that information for you and do things like look up a rough geographical area that the IP address was associated with. I guess those may still be around somewhere as the basic technology and layout of web server log files hasn’t changed in a long, long time.
I don’t know how others deal with log files on their servers but I have mine set to rotate the logs nightly and only keep the last week’s worth. And I gave up trying to analyze my visitors long ago. So all my sites are private and if I get a subpoena I only have the last week worth of data to hand over. Given that my sites have very innocuous things on them I’d be really, really surprised if any authority would ask what my visitors have been.
I’m looking for an email service that can send blog posts out to people who subscribe. I’m not interested in seeing how many people opened it, how often they opened it etc as I believe that is invasive, and don’t like that others do that with email lists I’m signed up to. My guess is that all email marketing companies take this information and potentially even use it for themselves. I was wondering if there was an email marketing service that didn’t do this.
With respect to the other questions, I guess insights as to visitors / traffic / web pages visited etc. are useful but I don’t want to be providing all of that to Google, i.e. be part of the privacy problem.
I live in Asia and the web host would be in the US.
I don’t have much insight into email marketing from Techlore’s perspective. We self-host our email generation (i.e. this forum) and use Proton SMTP to deliver emails unchanged so they don’t include tracking the same way SendGrid or someone similar would. But a newsletter is a different situation than ours, so our email setup isn’t really applicable to you.
There aren’t many modern tools that do this nicely (although the older ones probably still work fine). My solution to this was to feed server-side logs to Umami’s API with a custom webserver plugin, so that I could run analytics without any client-side code.
If you haven’t already settled on WordPress, I’d highly recommend Ghost, it’s a great platform and brings a lot of the complexity of WordPress out. It doesn’t need any plugins (meaning you don’t have to worry about outdated plugins getting you hacked) and has allows you to use simple toggle switches to configure mail tracking.
The one thing with Ghost is that you’re currently locked to Mailgun for newsletters. However, the Mailgun free plan[1] offers a generous 1k emails a month. Even if you aren’t going to use Ghost, I still recommend Mailgun because of the free plan.[2]
Technically, the plan requires a credit card to be added to the account. ↩︎
They recently removed the option to select the plan, so you have to get a plan, get charged for that month ($35 USD for smallest plan), than downgrade to the plan. If you’re interested in the process, let me know, I’ll send some instructions. ↩︎
