Website visitor stats without cookies or a banner

By Povilas, who runs Ginta · 9 November 2026 · 5 min read

You can count page views, see your most visited pages and find out which websites send you visitors without setting any cookie, so without a cookie banner: count the requests on the server, or use an analytics tool built to work without cookies. What you give up is an exact count of different people, and following anyone from one visit to the next. For most small business websites, the numbers you keep are the ones you'd actually look at.

Every fact about the tools below comes from their own pages, checked on 9 November 2026. Prices change, so open the links before you choose. Whether you need consent at all is explained in do I need a cookie banner?

What cookie-free stats can and can't tell you

They can tell you:

• How many pages were viewed, per day.
• Which pages people open most.
• Which websites sent them: Google, Instagram, a directory, a newspaper.
• With some tools, roughly which countries and devices they use.

They can't tell you, or only as an estimate:

• How many different people visited. Without something stored on the device, the same person on Monday and Tuesday looks like two visitors, or like page views with no person at all.
• Whether someone came back a week later, or what they did over several visits.
• Which ad a buyer saw last week. That's what advertising pixels are for, and they need consent in the EU and the UK: see how to add a Meta Pixel legally.

Your options

Your host's logs or built-in stats

Every web server sees each request, so many hosts and website builders show page counts without adding anything to your pages. The catch is bots: a raw log counts crawlers and scripts too, so the numbers depend on how well they're filtered.

Cookie-free analytics tools

You add a small script, and the tool shows a dashboard. These four say they work without cookies:

Two details worth knowing. Cloudflare counts "visits" as page views that arrive from another website, rather than unique visitors (Cloudflare's launch post), and its FAQ says you can see the previous six months of data, with a soft limit of ten sites per account. Plausible's price was shown in US dollars when we checked; the page may show your own currency.

The "no banner" lines above are each company's own claim. The responsibility for your website stays yours: the EU rule covers anything stored on or read from the device, not only cookies.

Google Analytics: the one that needs a banner

Google Analytics 4 sets two cookies, _ga and _ga_<container-id>, each lasting two years by default (Google Analytics help), so in the EU it needs consent before it loads. It does far more than the tools above: events, conversions, audiences, links to Google Ads. If you need that, use it with a proper banner; if you only want to know how many people read your menu, it's more than you need.

How Ginta counts visitors

We make Ginta, so here's what our websites do. Every Ginta website counts its own views in its Visitors tab, on every plan, Free included:

• Page views per day for the last 30 days, and today's count.
• Most viewed pages.
• Where visitors come from: the referring website's domain only, never the full address.

The counting happens on Ginta's server when a page is requested. There is no script, no cookie and nothing stored on the visitor's device, and the count stores no IP address and no visitor ID. Obvious bots and link previews (the little cards WhatsApp or Facebook make from a link) aren't counted, and neither are your own previews in Ginta's editor. The website's privacy page says visits are counted per day without identifying anyone.

If you build from Claude or ChatGPT, your assistant can read the same numbers with Ginta's get_stats tool, together with the website's phone speed and SEO scores. More in the stats docs.

Where Ginta is weaker

Plainly:

• No unique visitors. Ginta counts page views, not people. Ten views can be ten people or one person clicking around. With no cookie and no visitor ID, there's no way to tell.
• No time on page, no countries, no devices, no campaign tags. Links with ?utm_ tags are counted as the page only, and the source shows as a domain (instagram.com), not which post.
• Bots that pretend to be browsers get counted. Ginta filters bots by what they say they are.
• 30 days on screen. The Visitors tab shows the last 30 days.

If you need more, you can add a tool to a Ginta website. Plausible's script is on Ginta's list of allowed scripts, so it works on every plan. Fathom, Simple Analytics or Cloudflare's script count as other outside scripts, which need a paid plan. Google Analytics 4 works on every plan by its ID in Settings → Marketing & tracking, and Ginta then adds the cookie banner by itself: see pixels and the cookie banner.

Written with AI help for Ginta, which Povilas runs; he also teaches a website-building course. The screenshots are from the real Ginta on the date above, and prices come from our pricing page.