When I started working on VisitRoute, I wasn’t trying to reinvent analytics or make some crazy complicated system. I just wanted something simple, private, and under my control. Most tools today either track everything (even stuff you don’t care about) or they are a pain to set up.

With VisitRoute, you decide exactly what to track. If you only want to know how many people click a specific button, fine, that’s all it will track. If you want to see form submissions or scroll depth, you just add the HTML attributes or use a small JavaScript function. Nothing extra, no spying, no “maybe this will be useful” kind of data.

It’s self-hosted, so the data stays with you. That’s important for me. I don’t want my visitor data living on someone else’s server in another country. If you have it on your own server, it’s yours.

And setup… it’s stupidly simple. Upload the files, open a small installation page, add the script tag, and then just put some HTML attributes where you want to track stuff. You can be up and running in minutes, not days.

I know some people will say but Matomo, Umami and other open-source tools already exist. Yeah, and they are great in their own way, but they also have their own logic and tracking defaults. I wanted something even more stripped down and flexible. With VisitRoute, there’s no default tracking at all unless you tell it what to track. It’s not an analytics dashboard with a hundred graphs, it’s more like a tracking tool you build to fit your site exactly.

It’s built with PHP, which means almost everyone can use it. Your hosting already supports it if you have WordPress you already run PHP so you don’t need to buy some expensive new server just to use the thing.

So yeah, VisitRoute is basically for people like me who want analytics without the mess. Not too much, not too little, just exactly what you need, and in your control.