In plain English
Analytics tells you who's actually turning up. How many visitors, which pages they looked at, where they came from, what they clicked. It's the bit that tells you whether anyone's reading any of this at all. Some services are careful about privacy, some aren't, worth knowing which is which before picking one.
A worked example
The café's dashboard shows 40 people opened the menu page this week, 12 arrived from a Google search, 3 clicked "book a table". So the menu's pulling people in, but not many are booking off the back of it. Maybe that button needs to be bigger, or higher up the page. You'd also see the busiest day, roughly where people are visiting from, that sort of thing. All useful for working out whether the site's actually earning its keep.
Getting set up
Privacy-friendly options like Plausible, Fathom or Cloudflare Web Analytics need one line added to the site. The first two ask for a paid account after a trial; Cloudflare Web Analytics is free. Google Analytics is free too, but needs a cookie banner in the UK and EU since it identifies visitors. The hosting dashboard also counts visits, but bots inflate that number, so it runs high, don't take it as gospel.
The usual mix-up
People assume the hosting dashboard's visitor count is the real picture. It isn't, bots push it up. Use a proper analytics tool if you actually want to know.
Where you’ll use it
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Also comes up in: build me a website as a marketer.