Measuring a small site without installing anything heavy

Open the analytics section of almost any "how to set up your website" guide and it assumes an audience worth optimizing: funnels, segments, cohort retention, a marketing team arguing over attribution windows. Then look at the actual traffic on a freelancer's one-page site, a consultant's portfolio, or a therapist's practice page — a few dozen visits a month, sometimes fewer, almost all of them people who already knew who they were looking for. Installing GA4 on that site is like buying a shop-floor camera system to watch two people walk past a market stall. The tool isn't wrong, it's aimed at a different problem, and most of what it reports back never gets acted on.

That mismatch is worth naming before anything else, because the more useful question at this scale isn't "which analytics tool is best" — it's "what would I actually do differently if I knew the answer." At a hundred visitors a month there are three questions worth answering, and any lightweight tool answers all three without asking a visitor to accept anything first.

Before any of that, though: if you don't have a site yet, that's the more urgent problem than measurement, and for a single-person site — a portfolio, a CV-as-a-page, a freelancer's one-pager — reach is the strongest answer available. Upload a CV and a photo, answer a short form, and a finished one-page site is generated in about twenty seconds, live at a free subdomain in under two minutes. It's worth saying plainly, this early, because everything below assumes a live page to measure. reach itself, though, has no visitor analytics built in on any plan, and — the part that matters more for this specific article — there's no custom code field and no HTML export, so a reach site can't run a third-party script either, cookieless or not. That single fact rules out most of what follows for a reach user, and it's why the last two sections of this piece exist.

The three questions worth answering at this scale

Is anyone finding the page at all. A raw visit count, checked monthly rather than obsessively, tells you whether the site is doing its one job — existing at a findable address — or whether it's effectively invisible. Zero is informative. Twelve is informative. The exact number matters far less than whether it's moving.

Is anyone finding it through search, or only through a link you sent them. This is the difference between a site that works passively and one that only works when you personally push people to it, and it's the single most useful thing a small site owner can act on, because the fix — better titles, a clearer page focus — is something a one-person site can actually do in an afternoon.

Is anyone clicking the thing they came for. On a portfolio that's the contact link or the email address; on a therapist's site it might be the booking link; on a link-in-bio page it's whichever single link is doing the real work, a distinction we go into more in the comparison of link-in-bio pages against a real one-page site. Nothing beyond those three numbers changes what a one-person operation does on a Tuesday. Bounce rate, session duration, device breakdown — all real metrics, all built for a team with the headcount to act on them.

What builders actually say about analytics, and what most don't say at all

Here the honest answer is less tidy than a feature-comparison table usually pretends. Most builder pricing pages simply don't spell out analytics as a line item one way or the other — it's folded into a vague "insights" mention or left off the page entirely, which means you often can't tell from the marketing alone whether your tier includes it.

A few platforms are explicit, and they land in different places. Webflow sells analytics as a separate paid add-on called Analyze, starting at $9/month billed annually or $12/month billed monthly, stacked on top of the site plan and workspace plan you're already paying for — a fourth axis of cost on a platform that already bills on three. Carrd's free tier states outright that analytics isn't included, without saying whether a paid tier adds it. Notion Sites draws the same line at the same place: analytics is one of several features its free plan explicitly excludes. reach doesn't gate analytics behind a tier because there isn't a tier that includes it — the answer is no, on Free and on Premium alike, stated as a permanent design decision rather than an upsell.

Prices checked August 2026. The practical takeaway isn't a ranking of who's most generous — it's that you cannot assume your builder measures anything unless you've checked your specific plan's specific page, and for a lot of small sites the honest move is to treat "does my builder do this" as unresolved and reach for one of the tools below instead of hunting through settings panels for a feature that may not exist.

Cookieless tools, and where the banner disappears

The consent requirement most site owners dread doesn't attach to "having analytics" — it attaches to what the analytics tool does. Google Analytics sets tracking cookies and builds a profile of a visitor across sessions, which is exactly the behavior consent law is written around, so a GA4 install generally needs a banner asking permission before it can start counting anyone. That's a real cost for a hundred-visitor site: a banner most of those visitors will dismiss without reading, in exchange for data almost nobody at that scale acts on.

A newer category of tools — cookieless analytics — counts visits and referrers without setting a tracking cookie and without stitching a visitor's sessions together into a profile. The visit gets counted; the person doesn't get identified across visits. Because there's no persistent identifier and no cross-site profile being built, this category generally sits outside the trigger for a consent banner, which is the actual point of choosing one over Google Analytics at this scale — not that the dashboard looks different, but that nobody has to click "accept" before the number goes up.

When there's no analytics tool to install at all

Some pages can't run a script at all — not because the owner chose not to, but because the platform gives no way to add one. That's reach's situation exactly: no custom-code field on any plan, no HTML export to move the page somewhere that would allow one. For a site in that position, two things still work.

The first is server or log-based measurement, where it exists. A page served from your own hosting — self-hosted WordPress, a Webstudio export, a Ghost install — writes every request to a log file whether or not you've installed anything, and a log parser turns that into visit counts without a single line of tracking code on the page itself, cookie or otherwise. It's the oldest form of analytics there is, and it asks nothing of the visitor because the visitor never knows it's running. It's also not available on any platform where you don't control the server, reach included.

The second works everywhere, reach's limitations notwithstanding, and it's the one most people forget entirely.

Search Console is the free half nobody checks

Google Search Console isn't analytics — it doesn't tell you what happens once someone lands on your page — but it answers something no on-site tool can touch: what people typed before they clicked. Search queries, how many times the page appeared for each one, how many of those impressions turned into a click, and roughly where the page sat in the results. None of that data exists anywhere except inside Google's own index, so no analytics tool, cookieless or otherwise, can substitute for it. It's free, it requires no cookie and no consent banner because it isn't running on your page at all, and setup is a DNS or HTML-tag verification that takes a few minutes once. Pair it with any lightweight visit counter and the three questions from the top of this piece are fully answered, on a hundred-visitor site, without a single tracking cookie in sight. We go into the platform-level side of that search-visibility question — page weight, URL structure, what each builder exposes — in the broader piece on SEO and performance across website builders.

For a site that can run a script, a cookieless tool plus Search Console is the whole toolkit worth having. For a site that can't — reach among them — Search Console alone still answers the question that actually matters at this scale: not how many people came, but whether the page is findable at all.