Why My Analytics Was Logging Every Page Visit Twice (And How I Fixed It)

I built a custom analytics system into my portfolio backend — a Django REST API that records page visits — and wired the React frontend to call it whenever someone lands on a project or blog post detail page. It worked, except for one problem: every visit was logged twice.

This is the story of chasing the wrong root cause, wasting time on a fix that didn't work, and landing on a dead-simple solution that lives outside React entirely.

The Setup

The backend is a Django REST API with a PageVisit model. The frontend calls a single endpoint whenever a user lands on a detail page:

// POST /api/analytics/track/