Tracking your first site

Learn how to start tracking your first site.

Let’s get started by adding LWS Analytics to your website.

First, you’ll need an account. You can create a new account here or login if you already have one.

1. Create your first site

Creating a site requires the following information:

Site name: The name of your site, can be anything you want really.
Domain: The domain of the site you want to track (additional domains can be added later).
Reporting timezone: This is the timezone that determines what ‘today’ means. We handle UTC on our server, but you would want to see reports in your local timezone.

2. Install the SDK

The recommended way to add LWS Analytics is via our npm package. No external script tag required - just install the package and start tracking.

npm install @lws-analytics/script

Then initialize it once in your app’s entry point:

// app/layout.tsx or index.tsx
import { init } from '@lws-analytics/script';

// Initialize once at app startup
init({ siteId: 'your-site-id' });

export default function App({ children }) {
  return <>{children}</>;
}

'use client';

import { useEffect } from 'react';
import { init } from '@lws-analytics/script';

export function AnalyticsProvider({ children }: { children: React.ReactNode }) {
  useEffect(() => {
    init({ siteId: 'your-site-id' });
  }, []);

return <>{children}</>;
}

// app/layout.tsx
import { AnalyticsProvider } from './providers';

export default function RootLayout({ children }) {
  return (
    <html>
      <body>
        <AnalyticsProvider>{children}</AnalyticsProvider>
      </body>
    </html>
  );
}

import { createApp } from 'vue';
import { init } from '@lws-analytics/script';
import App from './App.vue';

init({ siteId: 'your-site-id' });

createApp(App).mount('#app');

If you prefer not to use npm, you can add the script directly to your HTML. Add this to your site’s <head> tag:

<script>
  window.LWS_ANALYTICS_SITE_ID = 'your-site-id';
</script>
<script src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/npm/@lws-analytics/script/dist/script.js"></script>

Replace your-site-id with the site ID from your dashboard.

That’s it ✨ it can really be this simple.

3. Getting your first page view

To test if everything is working, visit the site you are tracking and refresh the dashboard. You should see that at least one unique visitor has visited your site.

Continue to the next article to learn how to track custom events.

Tracking your first site

1. Create your first site

2. Install the SDK

3. Getting your first page view

Introduction

Installation

Custom events