So, we decided to change the web site (this is actually an underground and near-invisible activity, I have to admit) to remove Google Analytics and start using a solution fuly integrated into the web site itself (with possibly private data being stored exclusively in France). Now, we use the Matomo open-source solution.

In the coming weeks, the web pages mentionning the use of Google Analytics will also be manually updated to reflect this change.

There should be no impact on your daily navigation here. But, feel free to inform us if you observe some incident possibly related to this change.

Google Analytics screen copy:

As you can see, really, the million award came only because, last week, there was a sharp peak of more than 80,000 visits in a day (I kept oscillating between 900,000 and 1,000,000 visits but could not jump this symbolic barrier). And it comes with nearly 1.5 million printed pages (another deeply symbolic figure to reach).

What is funny is that this load peak (perfectly handled by the OVH web server) just came a few days after the personal experimentations I was mentioning here to optimize Roumazeilles.net and YLovePhoto.com performance. As a matter of fact, the actions that I applied were really representative of what must be done to have a web site doing much more than the usual web business card:

• A small dedicated server (much better than the shared web hosting services which are really cheap but stay very limited in case of a sharp traffic increase);
• WordPress in a recent version (here, version 3.0.1);
• The W3 Total Cache plugin to optimize the cache and the performance of the WordPress web site (my analysis of W3 Total Cache);
• Reducing the less-than-important operations through the search for low performance using the performance analysis tool of your web site;

But on top of the technical face of the case, I am not a little proud of having received more than a million visits.