Plug for Google Analytics Plugin
Here’s why you should use a Google Analytics plugin on your WordPress site:
Last month I spent a fair amount of time revising my arts and photos blog so it would respond well on platforms such as mobile and tablets. I then got busy with various work projects.
A few weeks later I looked into Google Analytics, and I was surprised to see that my stats for my site had dropped significantly. At first, I thought my readership really *had* dropped. But then I realized that only the links to my Arts and Photos blog weren’t appearing in the analytics. I decided to add the analytics back into that blog as a plugin. Sure enough, my readership is back on the upswing. When I change the theme in the future, I now won’t have to remember to add the analytics back into the code, because the plugin is separate from the theme.
The plugin I use is Google Analytics for WordPress by Yoast.
On the other hand, if you think you will never change your theme or you are very organized, maybe you will want to put the Google Analytics code directly into your theme. Paul Underwood writes how to display Google Analytics without a Plugin.
Do you have a strong preference – with or without the plugin for Google Analytics?
Leora – yea i have been in that spot before. I am currently using the same plugin by Yoast. Never bothered to check the stats though :-)
Leora. Thanks for sharing Yoast. Yes. G-Analytics really helps a lot to understand quality data collection & accuracy. Also, allows to fine-tune the blog as well. I am trying yahoo explorer too which provide applicable statistics.Please have a try. Thanks. Manickam
I keep saying I’m going to check out Bing Webmaster as Praveen suggested and wrote in a blog post – still have yet to do so. I’ll keep Yahoo Explorer in mind.
Next on my list is converting this blog to responsive web, so it shows nicely on mobile and tablets. That will be a big task. Not happening this week.
Thanks for the comment!
Hello Leora
I understand that having the Google analytics in a plugin is good because if you change the theme then you don’t have to worry about copying over the functions.php page.
But I think having the Google analytics in the code gives you much more control over your analytics. For example what happens if yoast decide not to update their plugins and then Google release a new update for analytics which involves changing the JS.
Having this code in a plugin means you depend on someone else to keep this up to date and for something as important as having good analytics data I much prefer to have full control over this bit of code.
Thanks
Paul Underwood
Paul, thanks for the response! I have more faith that Yoast will update the plugin than I will. If he doesn’t update, a lot of us will be switching to new plugins. One can only have minute control over so much in life if you want to get other things done. But if updating the code works for you, that’s great.