Using Umami to Track Visitors of my Homepage

I am really curious how many people visit my homepage. Previously I have used GoAccess, but that showed mainly bots. I have now switched to Umami, which can be self-hosted and only shows visits of real people.

The main difference between both systems is how they get their insights. GoAccess uses server access logs, which track all requests for resources (server files). In the old days, these requests were created by real people visiting your website and therefore leaving traces in the logs. But every now and then, a spider (bot) would appear to crawl your website, Google being the obvious example. Today, the majority of page requests is done by bots. AI companies crawl the web for every piece of human-created content they can get. Hackers crawl the web to explore vulnerabilities, probing for widely used systems like Wordpress. In the end, I could not see any human trace in the GoAccess dashboard, making it useless for me.

The alternative uses some kind of active content on the web page itself. This can be a pixel loaded from the tracking provider or a script sending a short message for every page loaded. Google Analytics is a well-known example, providing insights about your visitors with many business-relevant features. But since I would rather use something simple and self-hosted, I tried Umami, which provides a Docker-based solution for hosting it on your system. Setting it up was a matter of minutes. And it does not even use a Cookie, so it is GDPR (DSGVO)-compliant.

I spent the last days eagerly waiting for someone to hit my page, other than myself. And there were a few people landing on my page, I have now a better view on real people visiting my blog. The drawback is that those who use RSS feed readers, are not counted. But those people were also invisible in my previous solution with GoAccess, which only counted the general RSS feed requests.