I have a website hosted on InfinityFree and I would like to know the best way to track detailed visitor statistics.
I’m looking for information such as:
Daily, weekly, and monthly traffic
Unique visitors
Visitor countries (Geo statistics)
Page views
Click tracking
Average time spent on the website
Device information (mobile/desktop)
Referral sources (Google, social media, direct, etc.)
Since InfinityFree does not provide built-in analytics, what analytics solution do you recommend that works well with InfinityFree hosting?
Would Google Analytics be the best option, or are there other free alternatives that provide detailed reports?
Google Analytics is definitely free, but I wouldn’t call it good. There are a number of other options now that have gotten popular after the Google Analytics 4 migration, and some have free tiers too. Most of them are limited in page views, but that’s probably fine for a website on free hosting.
Again, not my experience. They have a few basic dashboards, but if you want to dive into the data, you’ll quickly find that it doesn’t work. There are no meaningful filters and no way to combine data. The reporting functionality is so useless that the “right way” to do it is to load the data into Google Big Query and query it there.
Also, they discard part of your traffic data and guesstimate it back. Which does not work consistently when you use the Google Analytics web interface, API and Big Query.
They also shot themselves in the foot by not offering data migration between UA and GA4. So regardless of whether you jumped ship or not, you would lose all your data anyway.
If all you need is an approximate visitor counter, then Google Analytics is more than sufficient. If you actually want to learn how people interact with your website (you know, what an analytics system is actually designed to do), you’ll find that Google Analytics is actually very bad at that.
I wouldn’t say that this is a difference between commercial and non commercial use, but more how much you actually need. But a lot of Google Analytics functionality is just not implemented in a way that’s actually usable.
If you made it, it’s your software, so if you want to put it on GitHub, you can. I don’t know why you’d need anyone’s approval to do that.
Eh. Like Admin said, it’s really only good for basic stats (And there are other services out there). It’s a fine choice, but certainly not something I would recommend.
Like all JS based tracking, you also need to be aware of the bias in the results. Lots of adblock users and most bots are never going to trigger your system, so even hit counting is going to be way off.