Analytics for Indie Developers: What You Actually Need
Most analytics tools are built for marketing teams with dedicated traffic analysis budgets. You are a solo developer with a portfolio, a blog, a side project — or ten of them. The tools are not built for you.
This guide is.
Why most analytics tools are overkill for personal sites
Enterprise analytics dashboards have cohort analysis, funnel visualisation, audience segmentation, attribution modelling, and hundreds of metrics. These tools exist because large marketing teams have the time and budget to use them.
If you have a personal site with 200 visitors a month, you do not need any of that. You need to know:
- Is anyone coming?
- What do they read?
- Where do they come from?
That is it. The remaining 180 metrics are noise.
The problem with complex tools is not that they are wrong — it is that they create decision paralysis. If you open a dashboard with 50 charts and cannot tell whether your site is improving, you stop opening the dashboard.
The five metrics that matter for most sites
1. Visitors — Are people coming to your site? A simple daily or weekly visitor count tells you whether your content or projects are getting any attention.
2. Top pages — Which pages get the most traffic? This tells you what content resonates, which projects people click on, and where to focus your energy.
3. Referrers — Where do visitors come from? Hacker News? Twitter/X? Search engines? A friend's blog? This tells you which distribution channels work for you.
4. Bounce rate — As a directional signal, it is useful. A high bounce rate on a blog post is usually fine. A high bounce rate on a landing page might mean something is wrong.
5. Trends — Is your traffic growing, flat, or declining? The trend line over time is more meaningful than any individual day's numbers.
Start with these five. Add more only when you have a specific question that the basics do not answer.
What you can safely ignore
Session duration — Unreliable for content sites. Browsers cannot measure when a visitor stopped reading and started doing something else. A high session duration might mean they loved your article, or it might mean they left the tab open while making a cup of tea.
Individual user flows — You do not have enough traffic to make this meaningful. With 200 visitors a month, looking at individual journeys is noise.
Demographics — Age, gender, and income data in traditional analytics are estimates based on Google's ad profile for that individual. They are not direct observations. And you do not need them for a portfolio site.
Custom events — Useful eventually, but only when you have a specific conversion question. "How many people clicked my contact form submit button?" is a good reason to add an event. "Because the dashboard has a place for events" is not.
When you actually need more
Privacy-first analytics like Antlytics covers the five metrics above. There are legitimate cases where you eventually need more:
Conversion goals — If you sell something, offer a newsletter, or have a key action you want visitors to take, set up a path-based conversion goal. This works without cookies and without complex event tracking.
UTM tracking — If you post links to your site on social media, in a newsletter, or in other people's posts, UTM parameters let you see which of those links actually drives traffic. Free to set up, five minutes to implement.
Real-time data during a launch — If you are doing a Hacker News Show HN post, a ProductHunt launch, or an IndieHackers post, the real-time visitor count tells you whether you are getting traction as it happens.
Analytics for portfolio sites specifically
Your portfolio is a product, not just a personal site. Treat the analytics accordingly.
Which projects get views — Your top-pages table shows which of your case studies, demos, or project write-ups visitors actually read. This tells you which work resonates with potential clients or employers.
Where visitors come from — Is traffic coming from your LinkedIn profile? A friend's recommendation? Search? Knowing the source helps you decide where to invest time in building an audience.
Whether your "Contact" page gets traffic — If people are visiting /contact, they are considering reaching out. A high bounce rate on that page might mean the page is not compelling enough to follow through.
Trend over time — Portfolio traffic is often lumpy: a spike when you share something, then silence. A trend line over a few months shows whether the baseline is growing.
Multi-project analytics on a budget
If you have multiple side projects — and most indie developers do — you need analytics that does not multiply your bill as your portfolio grows.
The Antlytics Free plan covers one site with no time limit. The Starter plan covers unlimited sites for A$10/month (or A$60/year). That means you can track ten side projects, your portfolio, your blog, and your SaaS marketing page all under one account for the same price.
Compare that to tools that charge per site: five sites on some plans costs several times the entry price.
Sharing analytics publicly (transparent dashboards)
Some indie developers share their traffic numbers publicly as part of building in public. A monthly "traffic report" tweet or a link to a public dashboard builds credibility and creates content.
If you want to share numbers, privacy-first analytics makes this natural: the data is already aggregate, with no individual visitor information, so sharing it publicly is not a privacy concern.
See building in public with analytics for how to do this well.
FAQ
Do I need analytics on a personal site? Only if you are curious. But knowing which projects and posts attract visitors is genuinely useful for deciding what to build next.
Is bounce rate still useful? Yes, as a directional signal. A high bounce rate on a blog post is usually fine. A high bounce rate on a landing page may indicate a problem.
How often should I check analytics? Weekly is plenty for most personal sites. Daily checking leads to noise-chasing on numbers too small to be statistically meaningful.
What if my traffic is very low? Analytics still helps at low traffic. Seeing which five visitors found you via Hacker News versus which five came from search gives you useful signal.
Can I start free and upgrade later? Yes. Antlytics Free supports one site with no credit card required. Upgrade to Starter when you need multiple sites.