When the Matomo server is unavailable (down) how does this affect my websites loading speed and tracking data collection?

It may happen that your Matomo (Piwik) analytics platform service is down / unavailable temporarily. Here are some important notes:

  • Your websites will still load correctly and should not be affected by any problem on the Matomo side. In the worst case scenario where Matomo server(s) are completely down and do not serve the /piwik.js file, users’ browser will still render your websites quickly because Matomo uses an asynchronous JavaScript library to measure users. The asynchronous JavaScript means that Matomo piwik.js file is optional for your website to render.

  • Due to the way the Matomo JavaScript tracker works, even if the JS file cannot be loaded in your users’s browsers, then there won’t be any JavaScript error in your website, even when Matomo is down. Your users’ experience should be unaffected.

  • If for a few minutes or a few hours, your Matomo service is down, you may have lost data for this time period. In some cases, it is possible to replay most, or all, of the lost data. Learn more about how to replay your Matomo web server access logs and restore your tracking data that was not imported during the outage.

See also Will the Matomo Analytics JS Tracker slow down my site?

Previous FAQ: Matomo doesn’t track any visits and pages, and shows « There is no data for this report » in all reports.