Google has announced that as of July 1, 2023, Universal Analytics will die. Not a natural death – they are moving to Google Analytics 4 (GA4). I’ve spent a bit of time converting my sites to this recently and have a few insights.

Or lack of insights. This is so complicated for the average user. But the good news is that if you have a WordPress website you can use Google Site Kit plugin (written by Google to convert your site. Dang easy.  5 stars! Install and follow the prompts. Done. (Maybe – will report later)

But if you have other coding? One thing I ran into immediately was like the other pages of this site beyond this WordPress section. HTML/PHP hand coded. Manual installation. That requires doing some work in the Google analytics panel itself. In the end it was only about substituting new code for the old. Not hard but then again I don’t do anything fancy – just collect normal stats.

Zen Cart is a wholly different issue. All google analytics plugins have died. Nothing has been maintained since version 1.5.5. I wrote a plugin a few years ago – knowing it wasn’t permanent and I may not be able to maintain it. It simply was a way to convert the main old plugin which dumped a lot of files into admin to a simplified bit for the header. After all the main thing needed is that GA code with the proper number. That may hold true in the future but everybody – using whatever plugin will have to change.

Now, however, converting your site to the new GA4 is a bit daunting. It’s not about just putting the required code into the website but about doing a conversion in Google Analytics for any website beyond WordPress and a few others. The good newsis that I did it with little effort. The bad news is I still have little understanding of all of this and that doesn’t work for someone who maintains websites!

So this is more an alert than information – this conversion is coming. You have about 7 months – don’t wait ’til the end.  Wait a while to pay someone to do it if you prefer – let us all catch up first! Or start reading :  https://support.google.com/analytics/answer/10759417?hl=en. I’ll be reading along with you!