Adding Goatcounter to Hugo, Simply

NB: This is implemented on the PaperMod theme

I was curious about adding privacy-sensitive metrics to my blog. When I was exploring Codename Nootka (which became Kibra), I came across Goatcounter. After emailing back and forth with a couple of dozen folks and talking with a few more, I realized that Kibra didn’t have the legs I wanted. Still, I filed away what I learned, including that Goatcounter exists.

I came across another blog post on how to do this but I didn’t want to keep track of changes to the theme, deal with a fork or git module; dependency management gets easier when you have fewer dependencies to care about. After poking around more in how PaperMod is built and Hugo’s affordances, I came across the extend_footer.html pattern.

Why not extend_head.html? Because we don’t want to slow down page load speeds by loading anything non-critical (apologies to my growth colleagues, but tracking pages loads isn’t critical; the content is).

So, adding extend_footer.html to this repo that uses the PaperMod theme allowed me to unlock privacy-focused analytics:

<script
    data-goatcounter="https://YR_ACCOUNT.goatcounter.com/count"
    async
    src="//gc.zgo.at/count.js"
></script>
<noscript>
    <img
        src="https://YR_ACCOUNT.goatcounter.com/count?p={{ .Path | safeURL }}"
    />
</noscript>

Check out that tracking pixel! Truly, a hack for the ages.

Update: 16 May 2026, now implemented with the New Schematic theme