It's been a weird week to try to get anything done. The Fed hiked rates again on Wednesday, a quarter point, the tenth increase in about fourteen months, and my timeline (yes, I still call it that even though half of it is bots now) spent the rest of the week split between "startup funding is dead" posts and everyone picking apart that New York Times piece where Geoffrey Hinton, the guy whose research underpins half the current AI boom, quit Google so he could talk openly about how nervous the whole thing makes him. Heavy stuff for a Monday morning coffee. I don't have anything smart to add to either conversation that a hundred other blogs haven't already said better, so instead I spent Thursday night doing something I've been putting off since roughly last September: ripping Google Analytics out of techpad.
Backstory for anyone who wasn't reading whatever form this blog took back then: I've had the same little snippet of GA tracking code sitting in my footer for something like nine years. Never really thought about it, it just sat there quietly reporting back to Mountain View every time somebody loaded a page. Then Google announced that Universal Analytics, the version everybody actually uses, stops collecting new data on July 1st. That's eight weeks from now. After that it's GA4 or nothing, and I'd poked at the GA4 interface exactly twice before this week and closed the tab both times within about four minutes because I genuinely could not find my own bounce rate. Apparently "bounce rate" isn't really a concept anymore, it's "engaged sessions," which, sure, fine, but I don't love a redesign that renames the metrics at the exact moment they're also forcing everyone to migrate.
So instead of learning GA4 I finally did the thing I'd been threatening for years and moved to a paid, privacy-respecting analytics tool. I went with Fathom, mostly because a couple of people whose writing I like use it, and because it's $14 a month for up to 100k pageviews, which is more traffic than techpad has ever done in a single month, so I'll be comfortably in the cheapest tier for the foreseeable future. Plausible was the other real contender and it's cheaper if you self-host it, but I didn't want one more server to babysit at 11pm when something breaks.
The migration itself took maybe forty minutes, most of which was me second-guessing whether I'd broken something:
- Sign up, verify the domain, get a script tag that's two lines long.
- Drop it into the template where the old GA snippet lived, then delete that snippet entirely. It was something like 30-odd lines of inline JavaScript once I actually looked at it again, which felt absurd for what it was doing.
- Let it run for a day and eyeball both dashboards side by side to make sure the numbers roughly agreed.
- Turn off the cookie consent banner plugin, because Fathom doesn't use cookies or fingerprint anybody, so there's nothing left to ask permission for.
That last step might be my favorite part, honestly. That banner had been sitting at the bottom of every page here for years and I always felt a little gross about it, like I'd bolted a permission slip onto my own site just so a third party could watch a few hundred daily readers more closely than necessary. It's gone now. The site loads a bit faster too, not dramatically, but Lighthouse handed back about six points on mobile just from dropping the GA script and the consent library together.
None of this is a hot take, nobody's running "man switches analytics provider" as a headline anywhere. But if you're running any kind of personal site or small blog and you've still got an old analytics.js or gtag snippet sitting untouched since whenever you first pasted it in, you've got roughly two months before it quietly stops doing anything at all. I'd rather you hear that from me on a Friday afternoon than discover it in August when your traffic graph flatlines for no reason you can see.
What do you actually lose by skipping GA4? Not much, as far as I can tell. Some demographics stuff and ad-attribution features I never used, since techpad has never run ads and God willing never will. Everything I actually care about, referrers, which posts are pulling traffic, how many of you are still on the RSS feed after all these years, it's all still right there, just without the eleven-tab settings menu and the vague sense that I was hosting a tiny surveillance device in my own footer.