Analytics for Portfolio Sites: Who Is Looking?
Lightweight analytics for designers and developers: which projects get attention, where recruiters come from, zero banner required.
A portfolio site has an audience of maybe two hundred people a month, and three of them matter enormously: the recruiter, the potential client, the conference organizer. Portfolio analytics is about noticing those three — which projects they looked at, where they came from, whether they reached the contact link — without bolting surveillance onto a site that is supposed to demonstrate your taste.
The questions worth answering
- Which projects hold attention? Views per project page arrive automatically; scroll milestones on case studies tell you whether the long write-up gets read or skimmed — directly actionable for which work you lead with.
- Where do serious visitors come from? The job application that mentions your site, the dribbble feature, the conference bio link — each distinguishable by referrer and tagged links in your profiles. When interviews spike after one platform, double down there.
- Do visitors reach the goal? Contact-link clicks, CV downloads, GitHub click-throughs — one event each. A portfolio with strong project traffic and zero contact clicks has a navigation problem worth one evening's fix.
The taste argument
Your portfolio is a work sample, and so is its network tab. A designer's site shipping 200 KB of tag manager, or a developer's site throwing a cookie wall over four project pages, contradicts the craft on display. A 1.1 KB cookieless tracker keeps the site as clean as the work — no banner, no layout shift, perfect Lighthouse scores intact (which also matters for being found).
Setup is one tag in whatever builds your site — Framer, Webflow, Hugo, Astro — and the free tier is permanently sufficient at portfolio scale. Check it monthly, before applications season, and after every feature — that is the entire practice.