[stevekemp]

Ironically I decided to ditch analytics largely because I wanted a faster site. Google's PageSpeed Insights page shows my site gets 100/100 on mobile/desktop, which was not the case when I had analytics available.

Of course such measurements are meaningless, but I had already come to the conclusion that I was adding analytics snippets to my sites as a cargo-cult thing; I never actually viewed the stats, and when I wanted to get a quick feel of the level of traffic I was receiving I'd just tail the server-log.

These days with CDNs, caches, and similar, I don't really have a single specific server-log to look at. But if the site is up I know if it became unexpectedly popular, because it was featured somewhere, when I get spontaneous emails from strangers..