The Dashboard Went Dark and I Started Enjoying the Site Again

There is a particular kind of morning ritual that involves a mug of tea, a slice of toast and a browser tab refreshing a graph that has not changed since yesterday. I know it well. For ages, my first job of the day was not writing, fixing a link or replying to anyone. It was checking the numbers on chrisjm.co.uk.

I am not talking about a massive operation. ChrisJM is a personal site: projects, notes, the odd opinion, a contact page that occasionally gets a lovely email from someone in Manchester. The traffic was never going to trouble a server farm. But the dashboard still had a hold on me. A flat line felt like a judgement. A small spike felt like a promise I had to keep. And the whole thing made the site feel like a shop window I was watching from across the street, rather than a room I actually lived in.

So earlier this year I switched the analytics off. Not the site. Just the counting.

The tab I kept closing and reopening

The strange thing is that I did not make a big decision. There was no manifesto, no dramatic post, no ceremonial deletion of a bookmark. I simply noticed one wet Tuesday that I had opened the dashboard three times before finishing my tea, and none of those visits had told me anything useful. The same eleven people had visited. The same post about a half-finished project was doing its quiet rounds. The graph looked like a cardiogram for a very relaxed hamster.

I took the tracking snippet out of the footer that afternoon. Then I sat there for a minute, wondering if I would feel naked. I did not. I felt like I had taken off a rucksack I had forgotten I was wearing.

What I thought I would miss

I expected to miss the little surges. A link from a newsletter, a mention on a forum, a quiet Sunday when a post suddenly got passed around. Those moments are nice. They are also not the reason I make anything. What I actually missed, at first, was the story I used to tell myself: that I could see what was working if I just looked closely enough. In reality, the numbers were too small to be a strategy. They were more like weather. Pleasant to note, useless for planning a picnic.

The bigger surprise was how quickly the writing changed. When I cannot see which post got the most clicks, I stop trying to guess what the algorithm or the audience wants. I go back to the question I should have been asking all along: would I want to read this? Would a friend who likes weird little websites enjoy it? Does it sound like me, or does it sound like a person trying to make a graph go up?

The site got smaller in a good way

Without a dashboard, ChrisJM feels less like a product and more like a place. I know that sounds a bit precious. But it is true. I have started writing posts that are useful to exactly one person, and I have stopped worrying whether that one person is statistically significant. I have added a page for a project that will probably never get more than a dozen visitors, and I am fine with that. A small site can afford to be specific. It can be odd. It can have a page about a broken RSS feed and another about a walk I took in the rain. That is the whole point.

There is also a practical relief. No cookie banner to fret over. No consent mode conversation. No explaining to a friend why a little script is following them around the internet. I am not against knowing whether people read the site. I am against the assumption that every visit needs to be counted, stored and turned into a little meeting with myself.

Three things I do instead

First, I pay attention to the things that arrive without a dashboard. An email. A reply. Someone mentioning the site in a group chat. A friend saying they liked the bit about the kettle. These are not metrics, but they are signals, and they are much closer to why I bother.

Second, I check the boring health of the site once a month. Not traffic, but broken links, error logs, a quick look at the contact form. I want the place to work. I do not need to know how many people walked past the window. If something is broken, I fix it. If nothing is broken, I close the laptop and go for a walk.

Third, I give myself a quarterly look at Search Console, mostly for the queries that make me laugh and the pages that have somehow gone missing. That is enough. A quarterly glance is a useful reality check. A daily refresh is just a hobby with a bad return.

If you fancy trying it

You do not have to delete everything and live in a cave. Start by moving the dashboard out of your bookmarks bar. Then stop checking it for a fortnight. If you still want to know something, ask yourself what decision the number would change. If the answer is nothing, you probably do not need it.

If you do want a rough sense of things, use something small and privacy-friendly, and look at it monthly. Server logs can tell you about errors without turning your visitors into a spreadsheet. And if you run a personal site, remember that the point is not to optimise a funnel. The point is to make something that sounds like a person. That is harder to measure, and much more fun to do.

The numbers were never the point

I still like it when someone finds the site. I still get a small lift when a post gets passed around. But I no longer start the day by asking a graph how I should feel. The dashboard went dark, and the site got lighter. If you run a small corner of the internet, that might be the most useful switch you make in 2026.