Plausible is a fairly simple analytics company. Unlike google, which takes every scrap of data they can, plausible respects their customer’s visitors. They are an open-source and affordable provider. I started using them recently to see who is visiting my site and from where. The only problem most of the people that go to my site are nerds like me… so they run an ad-block. Most ad-blockers unfortunately block plausible.

All of that being said, we don’t have to lose hope now! You can actually proxy the script from your website. They have lots of methods like WordPress plugin, Apache, Nginx etc. My problem is I use shared hosting, I could move back to a VPS, but I like not having to maintain my server. Thankfully someone made a little PHP script. There git page has all the information you need, but I want to walk you through (It’s also a useful reference for me).

You can find their git page here: github.com.

Setup

  1. You want to download the latest release! You can find it HERE. It is just the source code zip. Then in the root of your website you will want to create a dir called stats. If you don’t put it in a folder it could break your website. Though you can also put it in a subdomain like stats.example.org, though we won’t be covering that today.

  2. When you have created the directory you will want to extract the file we downloaded and copy the .htdocs, index.php and options.php to that directory. Now you have the files in the correct place you can modify the options. First you want to remove any entries from $mapping. Like this:

$mapping = [
    '/foo/bar.js' => '/js/script.outbound-links.js'
];

to:

$mapping = [];
  1. You now need to add the script to your header:
<script defer data-domain="YOUR DOMAIN" data-api="/stats/api/event" src="/stats/js/script.js"></script>

If you are using Hugo to generate your website you will need to find external_head.html normally found in your theme directory like this themes/THEME/layouts/partials/extend_head.html. When you have added that you can re-generate your website and push it up to your shared hosting.