We have always been committed to providing the best possible experience for our users, and part of that commitment involves continuously evaluating and improving our practices. Today, we want to share a significant change we made some time ago: we have stopped using Google Analytics on our platform.

We would like to give you some insight into our reasoning behind this decision.

A blue-purple gradient blob in the background with the text 'Switching to Plausible' in the foreground with the Transloadit and Plausible logos.

Our commitment to privacy

At Transloadit, the respect for privacy is a core driver in everything we do. We believe that any data from you or your customers is shared with us under an agreement of trust, and we take this responsibility very seriously. This is why we discard and anonymize data at the earliest chance. We'll never be a business that makes money mining data. Google is, and their products hence have a tendency to optimize for the opposite. We felt uneasy about feeding further into this by using Google Analytics, despite the powerful insights it might deliver. It was an easy decision between more fine-grained (sometimes quite personal) insights and our users' privacy.

Impact on performance

Besides privacy concerns, Google Analytics comes with another cost: it is a relatively heavy script that can lead to slower load times for users. We want to provide a fast experience on our website, and removing Google Analytics is an easy improvement we can make in that area (although there's still more for us to do).

Bar chart showing the script size of Google Tag Manager, Google Analytics and Plausible, with Plausible being the smallest at 1.3KB.

The comparison above shows that there is a way forward, without the almost 20KB of extra JavaScript bloat.

The complexity of Google Analytics

While Google Analytics offers a wealth of data, we struggled to find use for a good portion of it. The tool is complex, often overwhelming, and at best we were only using a fraction of its capabilities. We needed something simpler, more streamlined, and approachable for everyone on the team, so we can get the insights we need without the extra complexity.

Our audience

Our product is geared towards a tech-savvy developer audience. The people that make up this community are generally more privacy conscious, with a high percentage using ad blockers. In addition, using browsers such as Firefox, Brave or Safari can interfere with the data collected by Google Analytics. Combined, these factors skewed our data towards the 42% of our audience that isn't blocking Google Analytics. In other words: the data we did collect, was mostly on visitors that weren't even our target audience, and hence proved to be not very representative or insightful after all.

A better approach

After careful consideration, we decided to switch to Plausible, a more privacy-friendly, lightweight analytics solution that aligns better with our values and needs. We host it ourselves, and we don't track data using cookies, meaning we could say goodbye to the cookie banner. By changing to Plausible Analytics, we can continue on our mission to keep improving our platform and site performance, while also respecting our users' privacy.

As always, we welcome any feedback and questions. Thank you for your continued support and trust in Transloadit.