Get Started on a Static Site

This is the version for everyone not running WordPress: hand-built HTML sites, Jekyll, Hugo, Eleventy, or anything else. Same two modules, same privacy rules, same reader-facing language, just without a WordPress admin screen to install it into. You get a folder of files and two web pages that walk you through the rest.

See a live demo →

Sample data, resets periodically. Nothing you do there is saved.

Step 1: Check your hosting first

This needs a PHP web host, the ordinary kind almost every hosting plan already includes, with one small extension called pdo_sqlite (also standard on almost every host). Before downloading the full package, download just the checker below, upload that one file to your site, and open it in a browser. It looks at your hosting and tells you plainly, in one line, whether everything it needs is there. It changes nothing on your server and takes about a minute.

Download the hosting check →

If it comes back clear, move on to step 2 below. If it flags something missing, it tells you exactly what to ask your host for.

Released 2026-07-17

Step 2: Install

1. Unzip the download. Upload the whole semantic-journey folder to your site, anywhere you like, for example as /semantic-journey/. Any regular file upload tool works: your host's file manager, or an FTP program.
2. Open install.php in a browser, at wherever you uploaded it, for example https://yoursite.com/semantic-journey/install.php. Answer four short questions. It generates a secret key for you automatically; there is nothing to type in from a command line.
3. The page that appears next hands you a small block of code, already filled in with your own details. Copy it and paste it into your site's shared template or layout file, just before the closing </body> tag. If your site has no shared template, paste it near the end of every page you want tracked instead.
4. That's it. Reader Progress starts recording as soon as a visitor scrolls into an article. The same setup page gives you a link to your reporting dashboard and a one-line address to add to your host's scheduled tasks, so old data clears itself out automatically.

No ongoing maintenance, no updates to apply by hand beyond re-downloading a newer version if one is released, and nothing to configure beyond that first visit to install.php.