Take your data with you

There is a link on your statistics page marked CSV, and next to it one marked JSON. They hand you your numbers as a file. No account, no request form, no waiting for an email with a download link in it.

This post is mostly about why that link is there at all.

What you get

CSV gives you one row per day with four columns — date, hits, unique visitors, and bots. It opens in any spreadsheet without anything having to be configured, which is the entire point of choosing that format.

JSON gives you the same daily figures plus the breakdowns: countries, cities, browsers, screen sizes, and your most-visited pages, along with a note of when the file was generated and which period it covers.

Both accept a period. Add &days=90 for three months, or anything up to 400 — the same window the statistics themselves are kept for. Without it you get the last 30 days.

It is a plain address

The export is an ordinary URL, which means it can be fetched by anything that can fetch a URL. If you want your numbers pulled into a spreadsheet once a week, or a small script that keeps its own archive going back further than 400 days, nothing here is in your way and no key is required.

That is deliberate. A download button that only works when a human clicks it in a browser is a download button designed to be used once.

What it does not contain

Worth being straight about: this is the same data your statistics page already shows. There is no richer hidden layer being unlocked. The export exists so the data is portable, not so it is more complete.

In particular there is nothing per-visitor in it, because nothing per-visitor is kept. The daily hash that tells repeat visits apart is deleted after two days and is not in the file. What you can export is what exists: counts, grouped.

Why bother

Because you should be able to leave.

A service that holds your history hostage is not keeping you through quality, it is keeping you through the cost of starting over. That is a poor reason for anyone to stay, and an even poorer thing to build deliberately.

Your visitor history belongs to you. If you take it and go somewhere else, that is a perfectly reasonable thing to do, and the tooling for it should not be the worst-maintained part of the site.