Analytics: visitor numbers for your community
You can see in the dashboard how many people visit your community — without cookies, without a consent banner and without stored visitor data. Measurement uses Plausible on our own server in the EU.
Switching it on
One switch, that's all:
- Open Analytics in your community's dashboard.
- Turn on Measurement active.
From the next page view onwards your pages report themselves — you don't have to build anything in, copy anything or sign in anywhere.
To switch it off, flip the switch back. After that no script is loaded on your pages any more; the numbers measured until then remain.
What is measured — and what isn't
The dashboard then shows:
| What | Period |
|---|---|
| Visitors today | the current day |
| Visitors, page views, time on page | the last 30 days |
| Visitors per day as a bar row | the last 30 days |
| Most visited pages | the last 30 days |
| Where visitors come from | the last 30 days |
Two things worth knowing before you wonder about a number:
- The numbers appear a few minutes after the first visit. Freshly activated, it says No data yet at first — that is not an error. Call up your page once in a different browser if you don't want to wait.
- The 30-day view ends yesterday. The current day sits separately in the Today tile, so it is not included in the 30 days. The display itself refreshes every few minutes.
Not stored is anything that makes a person recognisable: no cookies, no advertising IDs, no profiles across pages, no IP addresses in the statistics. There is therefore no list of individual visitors either — only numbers.
Transmitted on a page view, however, are the IP address and browser identifier — without them there would be no way to tell whether two views come from the same person, and every visit would appear to come from the same country. Plausible combines both with a random value that changes daily into a hash and discards them afterwards; what remains stored is only aggregated information: page, source, country, browser and device type.
That is exactly why you need no consent banner for this measurement. A paragraph about it still belongs in your community's privacy policy (see Pages) — for example: We use Plausible Analytics, self-hosted in the EU, to measure reach. No cookies are set. The IP address and browser identifier are transmitted to the measuring endpoint, but are processed there only into a hash that changes daily, in order to recognise returning visits, and are not stored; only aggregated information such as page, source, country, browser and device type is stored. Responsibility for that text is yours, not the platform's.
Your own Plausible site (advanced)
Already have your own site on our Plausible instance and want to see your
numbers there? Then enter its script ID under Advanced (it starts with
pa- and can be found in Plausible under Site Installation).
Three things about that:
- An entered script ID overrides the switch above: measurement then goes exclusively into your site.
- Emptying the field again and saving gives the switch its effect back.
- This option is meant for advanced users. Without a site of your own you don't need it — the switch alone is enough.