Should be a Given, But Still Very Important: Web Analytics Maintenance

For all of you other WordPress geeks and theme whores (pardon my French) out there like me, I just have to make mention of something that is critically important:

When changing themes, make SURE your web analytics tracking code is carried over.

To give a wee-bit of insight, I learned this the hard way just recently.  As you may have noticed, I started blogging pretty much every day of the work week.  Missed Friday of last week since Thursday was my birthday (the big 24 – officially mid-twenties now. Scary.), but I felt I did pretty well.

Well I have been through almost 6 different themes in the 2-3 years I’ve had this site, and usually I am anal retentive when it comes to making sure that tracking code is carried over.  Well, I got a bit lazy in the past 6 months, I guess.

Changed my theme using WooThemes, which has an admin Theme option for inputting footer scripts like tracking code.  Well needless to say, I took that for granted and did not check the source of my pages to be sure.  And frankly, at the time, tracking code wasn’t important.  I just wanted to play with a new theme :)

Moral of the story: Check, check and check again to be sure that you have the correct tracking code placed wherever it needs to be on your pages.

I think I lost about 2 months worth of site data.  Really nothing to get upset about, since I think I’m averaging a piddly 3-4 visits/day, but that’s still valuable data that I cannot get back.

Good thing I got it back on in time for my bday tho!  I think I got a whopping 15 visits on the 4th and 5th! WooHoo! :-P

Stay classy.