When I read Rachel’s post about analytics, I realized that I wasn’t alone in this journey.
After starting to blog regularly on Medium in 2015, I became obsessed with analytics—how many people read my text, where they come from, and how many pages they have read. Then, I moved to my own website, which made things worse after I installed GA. I started playing with GA features to analyze whatever small traffic I had. It came to a point where I stopped writing, like Keenan.
I moved to Plausible Analytics to reduce the amount of data I had. Well, I thought that was the solution, at least. Naïve.
I struggled a lot with little data. I tried to make sense of what people like more so I could write more about those topics or try other formats that didn’t suit my writing.
Over a year ago, something clicked in my mind, and I turned off all analytics. I realized I didn’t want to become a content creator; it was such a relief.
That helped me to write even more. But, more importantly, be myself more. But when I moved this website hosting to Netlify, I (once more) turned on Netlify’s server-side analytics. It collects very limited data (and that’s why I opted in). Although it helped me in the beginning to learn so many 404 (not found) errors and broken links, it’s not helpful anymore, and I’m not checking the data at all (maybe 2-3 times a month).
Today, I also canceled Netlify’s analytics subscription (thanks Rachel for the reminder). That means no more data on visitors.
Analytics of any kind are not helpful in my journey. It’s harmful because it impacts my writing (hence, my thinking).
What matters is the journey full of high-quality ideas shared with people who are kind enough to follow this blog and let me know when they have comments/thoughts on what I wrote.
P.S. This decision goes into my list of decisions that remove hundreds of decisions.
Preview: