Measuring nothing

These three sites have no analytics. Not a privacy-friendly one with a shortened IP, not a self-hosted dashboard, not a server-side counter. Nothing records which pages are read, where visitors come from, or which link was clicked.

That is a deliberate choice, and it has a price.

What is missing

I cannot tell which project write-up people actually read. I cannot see whether the services page or the contact page is the useful one. If a link from a forum brings a hundred visitors, I will never know. Decisions about what to write next are made from correspondence and guesswork rather than a dashboard.

For a site whose purpose is to be found by people considering a piece of work, that is a real limitation. Analytics would answer questions that are currently unanswerable.

What is gained

The site loads without a consent banner, because there is nothing to consent to. There are no cookies, so there is no cookie policy to keep in sync with reality. There is no third-party script with access to the page, which also means there is no third-party script to break, slow down, or change its terms.

The privacy notice can be short and factual. The contact form is the only place where a visitor deliberately hands over personal data, and that is a much easier thing to explain than a background system that observes everyone.

There is also a maintenance argument. A tracking setup is a dependency: an account, a script, a data retention policy, and a periodic review. For a site this size, that is more machinery than the information is worth.

What is kept

The server still produces ordinary access logs for security and troubleshooting. They contain IP addresses and request paths, and they exist whether or not anyone looks at them. They are not used to build reports, and the privacy notice says so rather than pretending the server is blind.

The only client-side state is the theme preference, stored locally and never transmitted. The only JavaScript loaded from a third party is the spam check on the contact form, on that page alone.

The position

I would rather run a site that collects nothing and admit that I do not know the traffic numbers than run a site that collects more than it needs because the numbers might be interesting.

If a future project genuinely needs measurement, the honest version is a small, self-hosted counter that stores aggregates without cookies or personal identifiers, documented in the same privacy notice. That is a decision to make when there is a question worth answering — not a default to install before there is one.