Opt out and exclude your visits from the analytics by setting a localStorage flag in your browser
This is the easiest way to exclude your own visits from being traffic. See how here
To prevent counting your visits, you can set a special localStorage
flag in the browser. Here's how.
To exclude your visits from being counted
Visit the website you'd like to exclude your visits from and open the developer tools in your browser. Right-click anywhere on your page and click "Inspect" (the wording may vary depending on your web browser) to open the developer tools. Alternatively, press the key F12
on Firefox or Chrome or Option+Command+i
on Safari. Then click the "Console" tab.
In Firefox, it looks like this:
Then paste the following command and hit enter:
localStorage.plausible_ignore=true
It will look something like this when you paste the command:
And you will get this message when you hit enter:
Note that you have to follow this process for every domain and subdomain you'd like to exclude your visits from. If you use multiple browsers, you also need to follow the same process on every browser you'd like not to be counted.
Return to your site to ensure the exclusion works
There are two ways you can check to ensure that you have excluded your visits:
-
1: Reload your site multiple times and make sure that the total page views number in your Plausible dashboard does not increase. This isn't very reliable if there are other people visiting your site at the same time.
-
2: Reload your site and open the browser console again. If you have excluded yourself, you should see a message saying "Ignoring Event: localStorage flag". You may need to ensure the "Warnings" filter (in the top right in Firefox and top-center under a dropdown in Chrome) is enabled before this message is visible.
To re-enable counting of your visits
To re-enable counting of your visits, you need to visit the website you'd like to enable the counting of your visits for. Open the web console in your browser and then click the "Console" tab.
Then paste the following command and hit enter:
delete localStorage.plausible_ignore
Allow anyone on your site to exclude themselves
To allow anyone on your site (usually beta testers or internal users) to exclude themselves from analytics, you could have them follow the steps above on every device, or you could provide a page on your website to do this automatically.
We have created a downloadable version of such a page for you to use freely on your site. There are two versions of this example, one with a CSS stylesheet included if you want to use our style, and another without any styling if you'd like to bring your own.
Note: With this method, similar to above, the page would need to be visited and enabled per domain and per browser, for every user. (And the page must be made available on the same domain as that which you wish to exclude analytics for)
Preview
Download and Deploy
For the styled version of this page, you'll need to download a HTML file and a CSS file and make both available together on your website.
(If you'd prefer a light-theme for this page, you can delete the dark
class from line 1 of the above HTML file)
For the unstyled/bare version, you'll just need to download a HTML file, and make it available on your website with any CSS you choose to add.