Ok, so when asking for help with updating the code on the website to move to GA4, my web designer says we never agreed that she would provide maintenance to the site and isn’t going to provide any more services. She also isn’t going to provide any information to help me move forward, so I’m hoping I can find help from all you wonderful, knowledgeable people.
I can do a good deal of front end maintenance, but not theme maintenance, and I don’t know how to update to a newer/the latest version of WordPress without breaking the site. I need to update my WordPress version if I want to install Google SiteKit, which would allow me to migrate to GA4. If I can’t update, I can add Google’s code to the header. I know how to do that, but again, am worried about breaking the site.
It looks like she has a child theme there that I would be editing. If I just replace the Google UA code with the GA4 code in the header, am I good? Do I need to figure out how to create a copy of these files somewhere? How would I do that?
Also, how do I enable myself to make updates to the WordPress version without breaking the site?
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From my experience, whenever I take over a website for maintenance after someone else, I always start with making a backup of it on my local server. I update and fix everything there because it gives me the safety of not breaking anything potentially in the process. If you don’t have a dedicated hosting or local web server machine, there’s always the option of using local environments (I’ve always used xampp because it’s very easy to set up).
As for analytics, if it’s not an e-commerce site, usually putting the snippet inside the child theme’s header file is more than enough. If, however, the site is some sort of e-commerce, I’d recommend using GA4 implementation through Google Tag Manager paired with a plugin like GTM4WP (free) or pixelyoursite (paid) so you also get datalayer integration for all ecommerce events for GA4 and more flexibility in general.
If you don’t have a dev site to test I’d really recommend not doing it yourself. Drop a couple of hundred on some support hours from an agency and make sure it’s done right. When you convert to GA4 you’ll want to switch to Google Tag Manager. Then all your Google tracking is managed in the cloud.
Updating the tracking code shouldn’t be difficult and pretty sure it’s just replacing the code like you said. The docs even mention you can reuse the tag so there’s no updates needed. Depending on the layout of your site, the location of where that Google UA tag could be in various places.
Verifying that the upgrade to the core of WP doesn’t break anything is a bit more time consuming and involved if you have a lot of dependencies, or if the theme is abandoned.
I usually include a few hours of lite work like this to make sure your site is compatible with the newest tech.
yeah as already mentioned start by figuring out how to make a backup. Maybe your host automatically makes backups daily or on-demand, if so then you could test out doing the normal non-host backup-and-recovery process and then if you mess up just revert to the host’s backup
You can use the Google Site Kit plug-in to do this.
Ah! Thanks everyone! With your advice, I made a backup of the site. Afterward, using the link that stuffeh posted, I was able to determine that my UA would transfer easily. I plugged the tag into the header. All is well. Nothing is broken. I have successfully migrated to GA4.
Now on to the bigger task of regular maintenance. Oy.
Just throwing this out there but when log in to google analytics does it give you prompts to convert your ua property to ga4? This is what I did initially for all of my sites. It uses the old tracking code, and then just send the data to GA4 (ie I didn’t have to put a new tracking code on my site).
Updating WordPress is done from the **Dashboard→Updates** section of your site’s admin. Full instructions in [WordPress’ documentation]).
Creating a local copy of your site for testing is highly recommended. Then you can quickly test changes/updates to ensure nothing breaks before updating the live site. A tool like [Local]) makes setting up a local site for testing fairly simple (see documentation for instructions on creating a copy of your live site).
As others have noted, creating a backup of the site before performing updates is strongly recommended, as is familiarizing yourself with the restore procedure before making changes, so that you can get back up and running as quickly as possible.