Built-in analytics
Traffic, traffic sources and form conversion numbers for every published PageFork site, with no third-party account and usually no cookie banner.
Every published PageFork site collects its own traffic and conversion numbers. There’s nothing to install, no account to create, and no tracking script to paste — it’s on by default once the site is live.
Open Analytics in the sidebar and pick a site.
The analytics dashboard is a Pro feature. On a Basic site collection keeps running, so the full history is there the moment the site moves to Pro. See Basic and Pro plans.
What you get
Four numbers across the top:
| Metric | Means |
|---|---|
| Pageviews | How many pages were viewed |
| Sum of daily uniques | Unique visitors, added up per day — see below |
| Conversions | Form submissions |
| Submits / pageviews | Conversions divided by pageviews |
Then Pageviews by day (hover a bar for the exact count), Top pages — each path with its views and the submits it produced — and Top sources, where those visits came from, with a switch between sources, mediums, and campaigns.
Choose a window of 7, 30, or 90 days. Days are counted in UTC, so a late-evening visit may land on the next day’s bar depending on your timezone.
”Sum of daily uniques” is not a range unique
This is the one number people misread, so it’s labelled literally.
PageFork counts unique visitors per day and adds those daily figures together. Someone who visits on Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday counts three times over a 7-day window, not once.
That makes it a good measure of repeat engagement and a poor one for “how many different people saw my site”. Deduplicating across a range would mean tracking individuals across days, which is exactly what cookieless analytics avoids. If you need true range-uniques, that’s a reason to add a third-party tool.
The conversion rate is site-wide
Submits / pageviews is the raw ratio across the whole site, with every pageview in the denominator.
That matters if your form redirects to a thank-you page. A visitor who converts generates an extra pageview, so the site-wide ratio reads lower than the conversion rate of the page that actually did the work.
For the number you probably want, read Top pages — it shows views and submits per path, so you can see how the landing page itself performs.
Turning collection on and off
Collection is on by default for every published site, and the Analytics page shows its state with an Enable / Disable analytics button next to it.
Disabling stops collection for that site from that moment. Data already collected is kept and stays visible — turning it off is not a delete. Turn it back on and collection resumes, leaving a gap for the period it was off.
This is per site, so you can run analytics on your live marketing site and leave it off on a client draft.
Nothing appears until you publish
Analytics only exists for published sites. Select a site with no published version and the page says so, with a link into the editor, rather than showing an empty chart you’d have to interpret.
What counts as a conversion
A form submission. Any form PageFork generated counts automatically, so “views → leads” is meaningful from the first day without configuring a goal.
Conversions attribute to the page the form was on, not the page a visitor lands on afterwards — so a form that redirects to a thank-you page still credits the page that did the work.
In Top sources the same submissions are counted against the source the visitor arrived from, which is the “which channel actually produces leads?” number. First arrival within the visit, not last: someone who lands from a search result and then clicks around before filling in the form still counts against the search engine.
That memory lasts as long as the browser tab. Someone who closes the
tab and comes back the next day starts a new visit, so a form they
submit then is credited to however they arrived that time — typing your
address counts as (direct). Attribution that follows a person across
days needs a cookie or a stored identifier, which is exactly what this
does not do.
What isn’t counted
- Preview traffic. Views inside the editor preview and shared preview links are excluded, so your own work doesn’t inflate the numbers.
- Unpublished sites. Collection starts when a site is live.
- Sites with collection disabled, for the period it was off.
If a number looks lower than another tool reports, this is usually why — along with ad blockers, which affect every analytics tool including this one.
How sources are counted
A source is where a visit started: the utm_source on the link if
there is one, otherwise the site that linked to you, otherwise
(direct) — someone typing your address, a bookmark, or a link from an
app that passes no referrer.
The numbers in this card are entries, not pageviews. Only the first page of a visit is attributed, so clicking around your site doesn’t add to any source. Entries are therefore never higher than the Pageviews number above — and on a single-page site, where most visits are one pageview, the two are usually about the same.
Medium is the kind of link, not the site: referral for an ordinary
link from another site, whatever you put in utm_medium (email,
cpc, social) when the link carries one, and (none) for a direct
arrival. Values in brackets — (direct), (none) — are labels PageFork
generates rather than anything a visitor sent, so they’re shown greyed
out.
A site with an unusually wide spread of sources in one day (hundreds of
distinct referrers, which in practice means referrer spam) has the tail
collected into (other) rather than storing every one.
Campaign links work the way they do everywhere else: add
?utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=spring to a link
and it shows up under those labels. Campaign parameters win over the
referring site, so an ad click credits the campaign rather than the ad
network’s redirect domain.
Labels are lowercased before they’re counted, so Spring and spring
are the same campaign rather than two rows that each tell half the
story.
Countries and devices are still not broken out. If you need those, add a tool that does it alongside — the two run happily together.
Sources come from the analytics script that ships inside your site, so they need a site built with the current version of it. Sites generated from now on include it automatically. A site generated before this feature existed keeps the script it was built with — it carries on reporting pageviews and conversions as usual, but its Top sources card stays empty, and republishing on its own does not change that.
Privacy and cookie consent
Built-in analytics is cookieless and first-party: the beacon goes to PageFork, not to a third-party ad network, and no cookie is set to follow visitors between sites.
Traffic sources are counted in aggregate. Only the hostname of a referring site is kept — never the page, the path, or anything in its query string — and campaign labels are stored as daily totals, never against a visitor.
So that a form submission can be credited to the source the visitor
arrived from, the source labels for the current visit are held in the
browser’s sessionStorage for the lifetime of the tab. That’s the
labels only — no identifier, nothing that can follow anyone between
sites — and the browser discards it when the tab closes.
In practice that puts it in the same category as Plausible or Fathom, which usually do not require a consent banner. PageFork does not turn on the cookie consent modal for built-in analytics alone — it turns it on when you add cookie-setting tools like GA4 or Meta Pixel.
Cookieless is not the same as “no data processing”, though. If you publish a privacy policy, mention that you collect aggregate traffic statistics. If your jurisdiction or your legal advice is stricter than the norm, follow that.
Built-in vs Google Analytics
Built-in analytics answers “is the site getting traffic, and are forms converting?” That’s the question most PageFork sites need answered.
Add GA4 or another tool when you need what it doesn’t do: de-duplicated visitor counts across a date range, funnels and multi-step journeys, audience demographics, ad-platform conversion tracking for paid campaigns, cross-domain tracking, or custom event taxonomies.
Running both is fine. Their numbers will never match exactly — different tools filter bots, count sessions, and get blocked differently. Use one as your reference and treat the other as a cross-check.
Sharing a view
The site and window are in the address bar, so a particular view can be bookmarked or sent to a colleague:
/analytics?siteId=abc— a specific site./analytics?siteId=abc&days=90— that site over 90 days.