What analytics does VeloCMS provide without a third-party tool?
Post page views, newsletter stats and a real-user speed dashboard are built in. For deeper traffic analytics, add an analytics plugin. No Google needed.
VeloCMS isn't a full traffic-analytics suite, but it does count page views for your posts. What it tracks for you out of the box is the views each post gets (the Top Posts card on your dashboard), your newsletter performance (sends, opens, and clicks for every campaign), a real-user site speed dashboard, and your member counts. For anything deeper — referrers, countries, devices, campaigns — you install one of the analytics plugins, and if you want to avoid Google entirely, the Plausible and Fathom options are cookie-free and privacy-friendly.
What's built in: post page views
The Top Posts card on your Admin dashboard ranks your five most-viewed published posts over the last 30 days. The numbers come from the same small first-party beacon that powers the speed dashboard: each page load sends the page route, the browser's user-agent string, the viewport size, and a timestamp — no cookies, and no IP address is stored. Known bots are filtered out, and the totals are recomputed every 6 hours, so a new view can take a few hours to show up. Treat the figures as a floor, not an exact count: visitors who block the beacon or leave before it fires aren't counted, and there are no unique-visitor numbers.
What's built in: newsletter performance
Admin → Newsletter shows stats for every campaign you've sent: how many emails were sent, delivered, opened, and clicked, plus bounces and unsubscribes. The numbers come from the email provider's delivery webhooks, so they update automatically after each send — the dashboard shows an average open rate across campaigns alongside the per-campaign breakdown. Open a campaign to see its event detail, where you can also download the underlying event log as a CSV.
What's built in: site speed and audience counts
Admin → Performance is a real-user Web Vitals dashboard: it measures how fast your site actually loads for your visitors (LCP, INP, CLS, FCP, and time to first byte) over the last 7, 30, or 90 days, with no personal data collected. Admin → Members shows your audience totals — all members, paying members, and newsletter subscribers — so you always know the size of your reader base, though there's no growth-over-time chart.
What's not built in: visitor-level analytics
The built-in count is deliberately simple: views per post, nothing about who the reader was. There's no referrer breakdown, no unique-visitor counter, and no country, device, or campaign report. That data comes from a dedicated analytics tool — which is a deliberate hand-off, because a good one does far more than a built-in counter could: referrers, countries, devices, UTM campaigns, and goals.
How do I add traffic analytics?
Go to Admin → Plugins and install the provider you want. Plausible and Fathom are the privacy-friendly picks — lightweight, and both state they do not use cookies (whether you need a visitor notice depends on your jurisdiction). Microsoft Clarity adds heatmaps and session replays. Google Analytics 4 is the most detailed option and the one most teams already know. Each plugin asks for one ID from your provider account, and from then on the tracking script is injected on every public page — your admin dashboard is never tracked.
Plausible and Fathom state they do not use cookies, so VeloCMS loads them for every visitor without a consent prompt; check whether your jurisdiction requires a visitor notice. GA4, Clarity, and Google Tag Manager are consent-gated: for visitors in the EU and UK, VeloCMS automatically shows a cookie banner and keeps the tracking dormant until the reader accepts.