Why You Don't Need Google Analytics

I set up Google Analytics on every site I built for about ten years. It was the default. Everyone used it. I never questioned it.

Then one day I logged into GA4 for a blog that gets maybe 2,000 visitors a month and spent fifteen minutes trying to find a simple pageview count. Fifteen minutes. For a number. That’s when I started wondering if I’d been overcomplicating this for a decade.

What Google Analytics actually costs you

GA is “free” in the way that Gmail is free — you pay with data. Every visitor to your site gets a cookie, gets tracked across the web, and feeds Google’s ad machine. That’s the deal, even if most people don’t think about it.

But the costs go beyond data:

You need a cookie consent banner in the EU. That ugly popup on your carefully designed landing page? That’s the price of admission for GA under GDPR. And if you’re not showing one, you’re technically breaking the law — multiple EU regulators have ruled on this.

Your pages get slower. GA4’s script is 45KB+ and fires multiple network requests. For a personal blog or portfolio, that’s a real performance hit — especially on mobile.

You get data you’ll never look at. GA4 has hundreds of metrics, dozens of report types, custom dimensions, explorations, audiences. I’ve watched people stare at the GA4 sidebar like it’s a foreign language. If you need all that, great. Most people don’t.

And then there’s the ad blocker problem. uBlock Origin, Brave, Firefox Enhanced Tracking Protection — they all block GA. Depending on your audience, you might be missing 30-40% of your traffic. The more technical your audience, the worse this gets.

What most people actually need

I’ve run analytics on blogs, SaaS landing pages, documentation sites, and small business websites. For all of them, the questions are basically the same:

How many people visited today? Which pages did they look at? Where did they come from? What country are they in? Desktop or mobile?

Five questions. You do not need conversion funnels, audience segments, or enhanced ecommerce tracking to answer them. You need a number and a list.

The alternative that took me too long to find

Privacy-first analytics tools answer those five questions with none of the overhead. No cookies, so no consent banner. A script that’s under 1KB instead of 45KB. A dashboard that fits on one page instead of requiring a certification to navigate.

The trade-off is real: you lose cross-session tracking, conversion attribution, and user flow analysis. If you’re running an e-commerce store doing millions in revenue, you might genuinely need those things. But if you’re running a blog, a portfolio, a docs site, or a side project? You don’t. And pretending you do is how you end up spending fifteen minutes looking for a pageview count.

Switching takes thirty seconds

Remove the GA script. Add a one-line tracking tag. Done.

You’ll lose your GA history (though Google has deleted historical data before, so it’s not as permanent as you think). What you’ll gain is a faster site, cleaner pages, and the honest answer to “is anyone reading this?” without the guilt of tracking them across the internet to get it.