3 ms·

you can do that without selling out your users

nicbou 4y ago
Yep, and we clever HN people know that. But the web isn't all clever hackers. There are lots of small businesses with WordPress websites who just want to see a graph on a page. They will keep adding cookie banner plugins so long as they can keep seeing that graph. I switched to plausible because the added privacy is also a major UX benefit: there's no GDPR banner on my website.
- belorn 4y ago
  I would claim, based exclusively on experience, that most small businesses websites are built by web design companies. It is people working in the web shop industry that make decision about build tools. Also in my experience, there isn't usually a GDPR banner on small businesses websites built on wordpress. A pizzeria, barber, local grocery store, or some other small businesses don't really have or need much on their website. A few images, a page for location/contact, a page about the employees/founders, and for the more advanced ones a web shop. No GDPR needed for any of that, and for those web shops, once a person is registered all the consent are usually given as part of the registration processing. The typical model that I see for small businesses is also one where no one need or want a graph over visitors. The customer pay the web shops a one-time fee to build the site, and then it mostly sits there until the customer decide to build a completely new website because the old one is getting too old. No A-B testing, no optimization for user retention, no frontend interactions, no user flows. Mostly all the customer want is to not be paying a web developer any more money. This is why some shops will utilize "proprietary modules" in order to keep the customer on their (usually partners) servers, in case the customer might get ideas of moving the site to a better/cheaper hosting provider. The most common situation that I know of when people are requesting visitor graphs is either when customer apply an marketing campaign and want to see the effect on their website, or when a conglomerate has acquired a bunch of smaller companies and want to make decision about closing down/merging specific website. In those cases the analytics usually get added when that need arrive.

Yep, and we clever HN people know that. But the web isn't all clever hackers. There are lots of small businesses with WordPress websites who just want to see a graph on a page. They will keep adding cookie banner plugins so long as they can keep seeing that graph. I switched to plausible because the added privacy is also a major UX benefit: there's no GDPR banner on my website.

belorn 4y ago
I would claim, based exclusively on experience, that most small businesses websites are built by web design companies. It is people working in the web shop industry that make decision about build tools. Also in my experience, there isn't usually a GDPR banner on small businesses websites built on wordpress. A pizzeria, barber, local grocery store, or some other small businesses don't really have or need much on their website. A few images, a page for location/contact, a page about the employees/founders, and for the more advanced ones a web shop. No GDPR needed for any of that, and for those web shops, once a person is registered all the consent are usually given as part of the registration processing. The typical model that I see for small businesses is also one where no one need or want a graph over visitors. The customer pay the web shops a one-time fee to build the site, and then it mostly sits there until the customer decide to build a completely new website because the old one is getting too old. No A-B testing, no optimization for user retention, no frontend interactions, no user flows. Mostly all the customer want is to not be paying a web developer any more money. This is why some shops will utilize "proprietary modules" in order to keep the customer on their (usually partners) servers, in case the customer might get ideas of moving the site to a better/cheaper hosting provider. The most common situation that I know of when people are requesting visitor graphs is either when customer apply an marketing campaign and want to see the effect on their website, or when a conglomerate has acquired a bunch of smaller companies and want to make decision about closing down/merging specific website. In those cases the analytics usually get added when that need arrive.