WordPress

Knowing about how to add google analytics to WordPress should be the top priority for any website administrator. It’s the first step to know about the readers of your website and what they are looking for. 

In this tutorial I will discuss the following things about Google Analytics, Including:

What is Google Analytics?

Google Analytics is a web analytics service provided by Google for free to check the insights of users and visitors of your website. It tracks and reports your website traffic in a detailed manner all the time. Google introduced this in November 2005 after acquiring web statistics and analysis program Urchin that was developed by Urchin Software Corporation.

Why Do You Need to Use Google Analytics In Your Website?

Knowing about your customers is the foremost important thing for any business, either it is offline or online. This will improve your sales and also gives better understanding of your customers or visitors of the website.

Here Google Analytics does the same thing for you by providing all the information about your website visitors including.

• Analytics Intelligence to get fast answers to questions about analytics data and insights.
• Analyze and understand how users are interacting with your site using a wide range of reporting tools like audience reports, behavior reports, conversion reports, real-time tracking etc.
• Access your data anywhere along with web applications, you can also access it through mobile app both in Android and iOS.
• Integrate Google Analytics with various google products which includes Google Ads, Google search console, Google Adsense for better understanding your website visitors.

How to Signup with Google Analytics?

Google Analytics is a free tool to track your website visitors, to get started with Google Analytics you need a Google or gmail account.

Step 1: Go through this Google Analytics page to sign up. You need to login with your google account.  If you don’t have a Google or Gmail account then create an account first.

Step 2: After logging in with Google account you’ve to enter an account by giving account name. Type your desired account name and if you want to share your analytics data with google tick the below options or you can uncheck those boxes if you don’t want to share any data.

Step 3: After clicking the next button you need to choose the product you want to measure. Select web to measure your wordpress website.

Step 4: In the next step type your website name, address, industry category and reporting time zone then click on the create button.

Now you’ll be presented with Google analytics terms and services agreement which you must agree to complete the setup process.

Now you’ll get the tracking code of your website along with tracking id. Copy the tracking code and keep it aside to use it in the WordPress website integration.

How to Install Google Analytics with a Plugin?

There are many plugins like monster insights, google sitekit, and GA google analytics available to set up google analytics on your website. Here I’m using Googel sitekit plugin which comes along with search console, pagespeed insights and Google adsense.

Now install the Google site kit plugin and activate it to set up in your wordpress dashboard. To activate the site kit plugin you’ve to go through a few verification steps which confirms you as an owner of the website.

After completing all steps with integrating your google account to the site kit you’ll be able to see the data from search console, google analytics and pagespeed insights at one place. You can analyze data separately from the left sidebar by clicking site kit menu.

If you don’t want other data like pagespeed insights and search console then use GA analytics plugin which only shows analytics data.

How to Install Google Analytics in Theme Without a Plugin?

If you prefer not to use a plugin for google analytics integration on your wordpress website then you can directly place google analytics code in the theme itself. For this method you need a child theme to avoid analytics code loss during theme updation.

Nowadays most of the themes provide child themes , if your theme doesn’t have a child theme then create yourself by following the below guide.

After installing and activating the child theme you need to paste the tracking code just before the closing </head> tag in your child theme header.php file. In this way you don’t lose tracking code whenever you update the main theme.

To add tracking code click on appearance > Theme editor then choose header.php and paste your site analytics tracking code just before closing </head> tag then click on update button to save the changes.

How to Install Google Analytics in theme with a Plugin?

If you find it difficult to add tracking code in header.php file then you can easily do this step by using a plugin called insert headers and footers plugin.

After installing and activating plugin go to settings >> insert headers and footers and paste the tracking code under scripts in the header section. Click on the save button will add that code directly into the header.php file.

Now we are done with the analytics setup and tracking process. To check whether it is working or not go to google analytics dashboard by logging to your google account and click on admin in the sidebar. 

Also Read How to Install a WordPress Theme

Under property select tracking info then click on tracking code. Here you’ll be able to see traffic status. Click on send test traffic and you’ll observe that 1 active user right now under status.

Most of the time tracking code works within minutes of time.If it doesn’t show traffic even after clicking the send test traffic button then try after a few hours.

That’s it you successfully installed google analytics tracking code on your wordpress website. You can go with any one of the methods mentioned above as per your requirements.

If you find it difficult at any stage of implementation, feel free to contact me through contact form.

We can undoubtedly say that plugins are essential things for any wordpress website. Because without installing any plugins, your website looks like a static HTML page. That’s why I curated the 10 best WordPress Plugins for 2020.

Plugins and themes are the main difference between wordpress and other content management platforms. There are thousands of plugins available on wordpress repository, as I’m typing wordpress having 55,661 plugins. 

Every website doesn’t need a bunch of plugins; instead, you can run your wordpress site excellently with a selective amount of plugins. Here I list out those best wordpress plugins for the year 2020 based on their features.

1. Wordfence Security – Firewall & Malware Scan

Securing websites should be the first most priority for any website owner because without having access to your website, you have nothing to do. Total attacks blocked by WordFence secuirty in the last 30 days are 3,982,857,948. This number shows the vulnerability of many sites.

You can prevent these attacks with WordFence security plugin. It provides full security to your website by using different methods like Two-factor authentication(2FA), adding login page CAPTCHA to stop bots, disabling, or add 2FA to XML-RPC file.

It provides access to the following tools when you install it on your website.

• Protect from brute force attacks by limiting login attempts to a minimum number.
• Real-time IP Blacklist to block malicious IPs.
• Integrated malware scanner to scan for malicious code in plugins, themes.
• Live traffic and tracking of hack attempts in real-time, including ip address and the timestamp on your site.
• Block attackers by individual IP or a range of IPs by setting IP range, Hostname, and Referrer.

Get WordFence Security from WordPress.org

How to Install WordPress Plugin Manually?

2. Contact Form 7

Any website growth depends upon customer satisfaction, whether you’re providing services or to get suggestions to improve your website, and you need a medium to communicate with users. Contact Form 7 will do that thing excellently.

With Contact Form 7, you can create and manage multiple contact forms along with customizing forms. This plugin also supports Akismet spam filtering, CAPTCHA submission to prevent spam messages.

This plugin is entirely free to use on your website, which is already used by 5 million users worldwide with a 5-star rating.

Get Contact Form 7 from WordPress.org

3. Yoast SEO

With the competition from other websites, writing content isn’t enough anymore. You need to optimize the content of your website without spoiling the central theme of the material. For that, you need a powerful SEO plugin like Yoast SEO. 

After installing this plugin, just follow the predefined configuration wizard of settings, and you’re ready to go. It provides numerous features that boost up your website rankings on google.

This plugin is one of the best wordpress plugins of 2020.

• Add Focus Keyphrase to optimize your content around that keyword.
• Dedicated webmaster tools tab to verify websites in all popular search engines with a single click.
• Yoast SEO provides the most promising features like cornerstone content, SEO analysis, readability analysis, XML sitemaps to automatic sitemaps for your website.
• Instant suggestions on how to optimize content for users and at the same for search engines also.

Yoast SEO provides most of the basic features for free. If you want advanced features like superfast internal linking suggestions, social media preview, multiple keyphrases, upgrade to the premium version.

Get Yoast SEO from WordPress.org

4. UpdraftPlus WordPress Backup Plugin

Taking regular backups of the website will be the utmost priority of any website administrator.

Website backup will come handy in most situations like migrating sites from one hosting provider to another, recovering from malicious attacks.

UpdraftPlus is the best plugin to do this job seamlessly with scheduled backups. Most of the hosting companies provide the backup facility to some extent only, after that, you’ve to pay the price. 

Ofcourse updraftplus is not entirely a free tool but provides most of the features for free. Some of them are.

• Set automatic backup schedules 
• Complete the backup process faster using fewer server resources.
• Backs up content to more cloud storage sites like google drive, dropbox, Amazon S3 for free.
• Backup and restore operations can be done in a single click.

Get UpdraftPlus Plugin from WordPress.org

5. EWWW Image Optimizer

Pagespeed is one of the ranking factors that search engines look to rank your website. Apart from that, users don’t visit a website that loads slower than usual.

Images are the best way to improve the user experience of your website. But you’ve to optimize them for getting faster page loading.

There are many plugins available in wordpress to do this, but most of them have limitations like image size, number images. EWWW Image Optimizer is not one of them. It has several features like

• No speed limits and unlimited file size
• Lossy compression technique to gain maximum compression without losing the quality of the image.
• Convert image to the most suitable format with automatic options.
• Optimize every image in your site beyond the wordpress media library.
• With Easy IO, images automatically compressed to the best size, lazy-loaded, and converted to the next-gen WebP format supported by Google.
• Bulk Scanner allows you to optimize all images with a single click.

Get EWWW Image Optimizer from WordPress.org

6. Sassy Social Share

Depending on a single traffic source that will hamper your site growth in the long run, you have to diversify traffic sources to social media, organic traffic, referral traffic, etc.

You can achieve a decent amount of social traffic if you have shareable content on your website, but without having social media share buttons, you can’t do that.

Sassy Social Share plugin will come handy in these situations. It provides the following features.

• Share your content over 100 more social sharing services along with Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIN, Whatsapp, Pinterest.
• Light coded plugin, which doesn’t slow down your website.
• Share counts available to encourage visitors.
• Free Icon customization Options.

Get Sassy Social Share from WordPress.org

7. Akismet Anti-Spam

Comments are a great way to communicate with visitors to your website. They will be useful to improve your website in many aspects, including site structure, content, accessibility. With the increasing spam comments, most of the website administrators don’t enable comments section. 

You can enable comments without being afraid of spammy comments with the help of the Akismet Anti-Spam plugin. It allows you to 

• Automatically Checks all comments and blocks the comments which look like spam.
• Based on the previous comment history, you can decide to block or unblock comments.
• URLs are shown in the comment body to unhide the hidden and misleading links.

To use this plugin, you need to activate the API key, which will be provided by Akismet based on your site’s purpose.

If you have a personal blog, you can get it for free. Otherwise, you have to take a subscription.

Get Akismet Anti-Spam from WordPress.org

8. WP Super Cache

We already know that page speed is a ranking factor for search engines. To achieve that speed, you need to optimize the website in every possible way. WP Super Cache does the same thing for you.

WP Super Cache is a plugin that generated static HTML files from your dynamic wordpress site. The static HTML files served to the majority of users.

There are so many caching plugins available, but this one makes your site speed without breaking internal files by simply providing recommended settings.

Get WP Super Cache from WordPress.org

9. Google Analytics Dashboard Plugin for WordPress by MonsterInsights

Knowing about your customers is the crucial thing for any business, Google Analytics Dashboard Plugin for wordpress by MonsterInsights will do that for you in a simplified manner. 

This plugin collects data from your Google Analytics account with your permission and shows that in report wise like Audience Report, Content Report, and Search Console Report, etc.

If you want to get real-time traffic without leaving your website, then MonsterInsights is the right choice.

Get Monster Insights from WordPress.org

10. Advanced Database Cleaner

Last but not least, the Advanced Database Cleaner plugin is a must-have for any wordpress website. If you’re on shared hosting, then this plugin will be more useful to clear junk and unnecessary files in the database.

You should remove unnecessary data to reduce your database size, which will improve website speed and reduce the size of the database. It can do the following operations without effecting other essential files.

• Delete old revisions of posts and pages, orphan post metadata, orphan user metadata
• Schedule database clean up to run automatically
• Optimize database tables

Get Advanced Database Cleaner from WordPress.org

As I before said, there are thousands of plugins available on the wordpress repository. You need to select which one is suitable for your website. Here we curate the list with ten best wordpress plugins of 2020 for any wordpress website.

Did I miss any important plugin that must be included in this list? Comment below your suggestions, or you can contact me through the contact form.