TLDR; Use Cloudflare Analytics.
When it comes to GDPR-compliance for web analytics, the waters can be quite murky, especially here in the EU.
Navigating what user information can be saved, where it can be stored, and working with cookie banners can be a real head-scratcher, potentially even impacting your website’s user experience.
Undoubtedly, the champion in the analytics arena is Google Analytics, a widely accessible service that most of us are familiar with.
When doing research about all of this some time ago, I found a lot of conflicting information regarding its GDPR compliance. Some sources claim you should stop using it immediately, while others argue it can meet the requirements if used in specific ways.
I got tired of reading.
However, I got exited again when I discovered Cloudflare Analytics — a lightweight privacy-first alternative developed by a trusted company. As far as I can tell (Disclaimer: I’m no lawyer), it seems to make a genuine effort to be fully GDPR compliant.
It does not use cookies to store visitor data, does no fingerprinting via IP addresses, and never saves any personal information of any visitor. It also doesn’t track people across different websites. Sweet.
Cloudflare Analytics may not have every single feature of Google Analytics (I do miss those real-time visitor updates), but it’s a breeze to set up and use. No need to be an analytics guru to understand what’s happening here!
With a small set of features like top-performing pages, visitor numbers, page views, referrer insights and page load times, it has everything I need without the overwhelming bloat.
And it has a super simple, clean UI. Very important!
So how do we set it up in Webflow?
There are apparently two ways of setting it up for your websites. Using a JavaScript beacon (a couple lines of code), or at the Cloudflare edge servers.
I’ve always chosen the first alternative, seems simple enough.
Step 1 — Create an account with Cloudflare
An account can be created at cloudflare.com.
Step 2 — Add a new site.
Now, add a new site by heading to “web analytics” in the left side menu and selecting “add a site” under quick actions. Just type in your domain name and click that beautiful little gray drop-down. Once you’ve done that, hit “done”.
Step 3 — Javascript snippet
Grab your very own, personalized JavaScript snippet. This snippet should be pasted in your Webflow project’s site-wide custom code settings, right before the body-tag.
Step 4 — That’s it
And there you have it! We’re all set. Sit back, relax, and get ready to witness those visitor numbers bloom like a field of wildflowers!