2026-08-11

Plausible on Joomla: the extension that does not exist

You searched the Joomla Extension Directory for Plausible. You got two results and neither of them was Plausible.

I did the same search in August 2026. Same outcome.

That is not a bug in the directory. Plausible has never published a Joomla extension. Neither has Fathom. Neither has Umami. Neither has Simple Analytics. The entire privacy analytics wave built for WordPress, shipped for WordPress and skipped Joomla completely.

So you are left doing it by hand. That is fine. Plausible is a single script tag and pasting a script tag is not hard.

The hard part is where you paste it in Joomla. Get that wrong and your analytics quietly vanish the next time you update your template.

What you are actually pasting

Plausible gives you one line:

<script defer data-domain="yoursite.com" src="https://plausible.io/js/script.js"></script>

It belongs on every page of your site. Not most pages. Every page. A tracking script that runs on forty of your fifty pages does not give you 80% of the picture. It gives you a picture that is wrong in a way you cannot see.

Once the script runs everywhere, reading the result takes five minutes a week.

Hold that thought, because it rules out one of the three methods below.

The three ways people do it

1. Edit your template's index.php. Open Site Templates, find your template, open index.php, paste the line before the closing body tag. It works immediately and it covers every page.

It also dies the next time your template updates. Cassiopeia ships with Joomla so it updates when Joomla updates. Your analytics stop and nothing tells you. You find out in three weeks when you open the dashboard and the graph flatlines somewhere around the last Tuesday you patched.

You can avoid this with a template override but Joomla overrides cover layouts, not the template's own index.php. Copying the whole template to a child is the real fix and now you maintain a template fork to hold one line of JavaScript.

2. A Custom HTML module. Create a Custom module, paste the script, publish it to a position, set the menu assignment to All.

Two problems. The position has to exist in your template and it has to render on every page, which is not true of most positions. And Joomla's text filters strip <script> for every user group except the ones with No Filtering. As a Super User you will paste it and it will work. When a colleague with an Administrator account edits that module six months later, Joomla silently removes the script on save.

3. A generic script-injection plugin. Several exist on the directory. This is the correct shape of solution. You are adding a system plugin whose whole job is to put code into the page, which is exactly what the job is.

Just check when it was last updated. The analytics corner of the directory is full of extensions that stopped in 2019 and still list Joomla 3 as their newest supported version.

Why Plausible is worth the trouble in the first place

Because the alternative collects things you never needed.

"Data is the pollution problem of the information age, and protecting privacy is the environmental challenge."

Bruce Schneier, security technologist, in Data and Goliath (2015)

That is the argument in one sentence. Google Analytics gives you a page view count and, on the way, builds a profile of the person who generated it. You wanted the count. You inherited the profile, the consent banner and the paragraph in your privacy policy explaining what Google does with it.

Plausible does not do that and neither does anything else in this category. That is the whole category, really. It is not a feature list. It is a decision about what not to collect.

What it costs

Plausible is paid. Pricing starts around 9 EUR a month for 10,000 page views and climbs from there. There is a free trial and no free tier.

For a business site that is nothing. For a personal blog that is 108 EUR a year to find out that forty people read your last post and that is a real reason people keep putting up with GA4.

You can also self host Plausible, because it is open source. Then you are running Docker, Postgres and ClickHouse to count page views on a Joomla site. Some people genuinely enjoy that. Most people asking this question do not.

Where StatJolt fits in

I built StatJolt because I wanted the Plausible answer without either of those two prices.

It is cookieless and it collects no personal data so there is no consent banner and nothing to explain in your privacy policy. Same decision about what not to collect.

There is a Joomla plugin, which is the part Plausible never shipped. You paste your code into one field. The plugin writes it into the finished page before the closing body tag, on every page, no matter how your template is built. Template updates do not touch it because it is not in your template.

It is 0 EUR until 2027 at any traffic volume and free for low traffic sites after that. In exchange it shows a small badge that you can move or hide.

You also get things Plausible either charges more for or does not have. Core Web Vitals sit next to your traffic. Funnels are detected automatically. User journeys draw themselves. JavaScript errors are reported so you find the broken script before your customers do.

The short version

There is no Plausible extension for Joomla and there probably never will be. If you want Plausible specifically, use a maintained script-injection plugin rather than editing your template and check that it still supports your Joomla version.

If what you actually want is analytics without cookies, without a banner and without a subscription, the missing extension is the reason to look at what else is in that category. Compare it against GA4 first so you know what you are giving up. On most small sites the honest answer is nothing you were using.

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