As a website owner you're naturally keen to know how many people are visiting your site and probably what they look at and when.

If you are outside the EU and the UK and not subject to the EU GDPR and ePrivacy Directives then you have two fairly straightforward  and free options (depending upon privacy regulations in your country).

There is a simple visitor counter built into Spanglefish 3 which you can switch on in Site Settings --> Site Settings. The counter will show at the bottom of your site - scroll to the footer to see our one. It's not very accurate because it can't discriminate between humans and bots, but it will give you a handy rough idea of how your site is doing.

This is pretty much the industry standard stats facility for small and medium websites. It stores huge amounts of information and can be very complex to use, but is also very useful in determining precisely how your website is performing. When you sign up for Google Analytics (which is free) you'll be supplied with an identifier something like UA-12345678-1. Enter it in Site Settings --> Advanced Settings and the tracking code will be automatically added to all pages on your site.

Both the methods mentioned above are available to you, but you now have to consider how they are impacted by the legislation which applies - effectively the EU GDPR and ePrivacy Directives. These are too long, complex and dull for us to go into here, but our current summary would be:

...you could probably just go ahead and install Google Analytics, switch on the Cookie Consent plugin in Advanced Settings and add a link to Google's Privacy Policy from within your own privacy policy. You may not fully comply with the consent regulations, but we're not aware of anyone having been prosecuted for doing this yet. (Note that this is not a recommendation to do so, just an explanation that the risks seem to be (for now) extremely small).

...you have limited options because you can't be seen to not comply with the law. You need to use a stats collection system which is GDPR compliant and doesn't use cookies to track visitors. A number of Analytics services have arisen lately which do this, and whilst they provide much less data than Google Analytics this may still be enough for you. We've decided to make one of these, Plausible, available to Spanglefish 3 owners - see below.

There are alternative analytics and stat counters available on the web. For example Fathom Analytics is another GDPR compliant system, and there are lots of legacy stats counters. If you have one you'd like to implement on your Spanglefish site, email us and we'll look into how best to do this for you.