I wanted to know if anyone was actually visiting my new side project — but I really didn't want to slap a GDPR cookie-consent banner on a tool that's supposed to be frictionless.
The default move is Google Analytics. But GA sets cookies, which (in the EEA/UK and friends) means a consent banner, a CMP, and a pop-up in every new visitor's face. That's a lot of baggage just to answer "did anyone show up?"
Turns out there's a much lighter option: Cloudflare Web Analytics. It's free, cookieless, doesn't fingerprint, and doesn't track people across sites — so no consent banner is required.
Here's how I added it, and the one gotcha that bit me.
What you get (and what you don't)
