How to set up analytics without cookies

Before you start

• Access to your site templates
• An analytics account

The steps

1. 1

   Step 1: Decide what you actually use

   Most sites act on pageviews, referrers, top pages and conversions. Cross-device journeys are collected far more often than used.

2. 2

   Step 2: Choose a cookieless tool

   Plausible, Fathom or Cloudflare Web Analytics. All aggregate without per-visitor identifiers.

3. 3

   Step 3: Install the script

   One small script tag. Verify it loads and reports in real time.

4. 4

   Step 4: Remove the old tracker

   Running both defeats the purpose and doubles the JavaScript.

5. 5

   Step 5: Remove the cookie banner

   If nothing non-essential remains, the banner is no longer required.

6. 6

   Step 6: Update your privacy policy

   It should describe what you now collect, which is less.

7. 7

   Step 7: Set up conversion events

   Form submissions, purchases. This is what you actually need to measure.

What you give up

Individual user journeys across sessions and devices, remarketing audiences, and demographic estimates. If you run paid remarketing you need conventional tracking; if you do not, you are collecting data you never look at.

The performance dividend

Cookieless analytics scripts are typically under 2KB against tens of kilobytes for a full tag manager stack, and removing the consent banner removes render-blocking work at the worst possible moment.

How to check what your current setup collects

Open DevTools, clear all site data, load your home page, and look at the Cookies panel under Application. Anything listed before you have interacted with a consent banner is being set without consent. Then open the Network tab and look at what is being sent to third-party domains on load. Most site owners are surprised by at least one entry, usually left behind by a tool that was trialled and never removed, and finding it is worth more than any policy rewrite.

The background behind this

Core Web Vitals, and the order that actually reduces them covers the reasoning in about 3 minutes — free, ungated, written from client work.

Who wrote this

Anas Bin Masud builds e-commerce sites and does technical SEO for businesses in the UK, Canada, Ireland and Pakistan. These procedures are the ones I run on client work, written down rather than invented — including the ones where the honest answer is that the fix is not available on your current hosting.