Display preferences: dark mode, reduced motion and data saving

What it is

A Display preferences card on your dashboard: the share of page views from browsers set to dark mode, reduced motion, data saving, more contrast or forced colours.

Why it matters

If a third of your readers use dark mode, your dark theme deserves as much care as the light one. If people ask for less motion or data, heavy animations and autoplaying video are working against them. Design for how people actually browse.

How it works

1. Add the small prefs.js add-on next to your quietstats tag (it sends no pageviews).
2. Once per page load it reads five yes-or-no settings the browser already shares with every website through CSS media queries.
3. The collector adds each one to its own daily total for your site. They are never stored together, so they cannot be combined into a profile.
4. The card shows each total as a share of the page views measured.

Set it up

<script data-host="https://quietstats.co.uk" data-site="YOUR_SITE_ID" data-dnt="true" src="https://quietstats.co.uk/js/prefs.js" async defer></script>

Replace YOUR_SITE_ID with the ID on your site’s settings page. Install guides →

Privacy: what is and isn’t collected

Collected

• One daily count of page views measured, and one daily count per preference
• Never stored together, never per visitor, page or time of day

Never collected

• Cookies, localStorage or anything else stored on the visitor’s device
• IP addresses or user agents (used in memory, then discarded)
• Anything that links a visitor across days (the visitor ID resets daily)

How quietstats works, and the legal caveats →

Rows and limits

• Optional add-on: script.js stays 845 bytes
• Rows: 1 written per page load with the add-on, at most 1 stored per site per day
• Data saver is only reported by some browsers (mostly Chrome on Android)
• Not affected by dashboard filters

“Rows” are database rows written, which is what our hosting is billed on. Reads are not rows written. Methodology →