Get metrics about your Github Pages page with Microsoft Clarity
This post was inspired by a discussion on Github. A thread on Stack Overflow pointed to a solution which verified at minima’s repository.
- Go to Microsoft Clarity and sign up for your page.
- Clarity then asks for the “Installation Method”. At the time of this writing, Github Pages wasn’t available under “Install on a third-party platform”. So we will go for “Install manually”.
- Copy the presented code block.
- Head over to your page’s repository and create a new file _includes/custom-head.html. Paste the snippet from step 3.
- Commit the change. Wait for some hours and get back to MS Clarity. You should see first results now.
Some minor hassle was between steps 4 and 5. The toolchain (my local jekyll for preview as well as the productive Github Pages) did not properly handle _includes/custom-head.html. This looks to be fixed when updating from minima 2.5.x to 3.0.x. I hope that when you read this, minima 3+ is delivered by default. But until then, I use a workaround. I gained early access on the 3.0 release via direct retrieval from its github repository. I updated my Gemfile:
- gem "minima", "~> 2.5"
+ gem "minima", git: "https://github.com/jekyll/minima"
Since we deviate now from Github Page’s vanilla environment, we need to configure Github Actions for Jekyll. When the .github/workflows/jekyll.yml template was proposed, I found no modifications necessary and committed the template as proposed.
Then I wanted to verify the installation again. And nothing happened. Then I realized, that I use Vivaldi browser which has a reasonable tracking blocker enabled by default. I disabled it for my page and MS Clarity started to show data. Getting data when tracking is allowed and getting no data when the user wants no tracking – that sounds reasonable to me. Mission accomplished.