I ditched Google Analytics on my blog because it more than doubled the size of any page load (the “Universal” version loaded a lot of additional JS). This was fine for a while, as I wasn’t posting much. Later, I wanted to write more. This might be shallow, but I found having numbers associated with my writing helped me keep at it. I also found it fun and useful to see what got traction. I tried Plausible for a while, but it was overkill for my needs, and I grew out of the first tier quickly. I then moved to Tinylytics [0], and have been enjoying that.

[0] - https://tinylytics.app/