I am in the process of going through everything and try to see what we have and what we don’t have. I’ll add you list to the group list and do a time table. Does January sound like a good idea to have the new site launched?
I think January is doable.
Ok we can have checkpoints and make adjustments vas needed. Thanks
Yeah, we’re working on simplifying things, but it will be a slow process. Regardless of where we end up with that, improvements to the front-end of the website will be very nice and much appreciated.
I created a Google Analytics account and added you to it. Let me know if there is anything else you need.
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Malissa/Heather
I am not apposed to setting up GA on our site, since I am not doing it. I don’t understand the benefits of adding GA.
How will adding this to our site help MakeICT?
How much time is required and would it be better spent on the website itself.
Will it slow down loading of site for people having add backside tracking.
It measures website performance and it doesn’t slow down the site or introduce security threats or have negative impact in any way.
Here’s an explainer video
Theres a couple ways to install it.
- through a plugin
- generate code from analytics and paste it in header file in wordpress site
depending on how the site is configured will determine which route to use. sometimes ftp access is required for step 2.
after the code snippet is in place the items for Malissa will be managed from the google dashboard.
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This will help me produce ads that target our customer once we receive a google ad words grant.
The thing I find most useful about having Google Analytics is it tells you without any doubt what people actually look at on your site, and what you’re wasting your time putting up there. You can focus your effort on content people want, and dump the rest.
All too often people develop a website with and ‘inside out approach’ and internal vocabulary / mindset and totally miss what site visitors actually want to look at. Save your time and energy and just post content people will click on. It’s not about you, it’s about them, etc.
We’re gonna dump our awful website at work this spring. Literally, we could have three pages and cover over 90% of the traffic to the site.
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Absolutely agree. It does a ton and wether or not we utilize it’s full capability now it still allows you to expand and see this data in the future to compare trends web flow, traffic changes etc. Metrics on metrics on metrics 
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I don’t have any problem with it. I will check your wp permissions tonight after work. If nobody has changed you from editor to admin I will change your permissions.
Thanks Tom.
@heathernew09 You are now an admin, please give a heads up when anything major is going on.
Try not to break it to much 
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You can always make a backup just in case.
Im looking forward to seeing what you do. Let me know if you need anything @heathernew09.
I use gtmetrix to discover and resolve issues. I’ve never been able to figure out why Google analytics and Facebook pixel slow down the YSlow score on my sites. But turning them off always seems to speed up WordPress page loads by several seconds.
Anytime I’ve seen performance hits from analytics or tag manager has been when a plugin was used to install it but I’m hoping to get into the site files and add it without an additional plugin. Gonna get in and scope it out shortly. Might even run a report to check performance before and after since google updated analytics script to G4, it has changed a bit and I’m curious.
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That may be it. I’ve added analytics with code snippet in the header before but I don’t remember doing that recently. I’ll have to look. Thanks for the pointer! I have the same issue with Google fonts too actually.
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- Google Tag Manager is added which holds the analytics code and is set to trigger on page views. Here are the gtmetrix test results. It did add a 3 requests and it says it went from 3.3s to 5 seconds. It was not recognizable to me however I have fairly speedy internet. There are some things I can do to counter act it.
Here are some other things that would help site health.
- I received an error when first logging in about the Woody Ad Snippets, is that in use, can it be removed?
- Update plugins
- Remove inactive or unnecessary plugins. These seem excessive or unnecessary and can be replaced by code : (Jetpack, Unplug Jetpack, SSH SFTP Updater Support, Redirection, Easy Updates Manager, Display posts, Bootstrap Carousel, TinyMCE Advanced, URL Shortener, Woody Ad Snippets )
- Optimize images (probably some not scaled for web or more than 72dpi)
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I don’t see a problem with the main site. I have tested a few pages. It might just be broken wordpress, so no urgency.
There are good questions, I don’t think anyone can answer with confidence. I don’t know who installed the plugins. I assume it might have been @dom @Kip @kim @Christian. I would like to setup a test site (clone) before we start pulling major components unless we are 100% sure it will not cause issues with the main site. I don’t want it to be down while we are trying to bring new members on in the next few weeks.
Let me work on a dev/test site.
It’s OK as long as the page can be interacted with quickly. Full page loads can take extra time. You can have “A” page scores and instant interaction on a page that takes 15 seconds to fully load. A lot of times when you scroll a page and then the page pops back to the top it is lazy loading requests to bad .json files elsewhere. Who knows what kind of crazy systems Google is sending its analytics traffic through. 
the waterfall will show what specifically is taking the time and divides it into priority and lazy loading, etc.
Thanks for the tag, @tom.bloom - I’ve been keeping an eye on this thread and I’m glad to see the website receiving some attention
Most of those plugins aren’t going to impact page load performance, since most of them are backend things and/or are only loaded when actually used on a page. I’m pretty sure that the ‘Bootstrap Carousel’ plugin is used on the home page for the rotating images there. I also know that JetPack is very large and probably checked a couple of boxes for us, but I don’t know if we’re still using any of its features and can’t really speak to the other plugins either.
One (other) thing to keep in mind here is that our hosting services are donated (unless that changed?) and, perhaps, isn’t the highest quality, most performant host out there, so there’s probably not a super high ceiling for what you can achieve by optimizing our Wordpress configuration/stack alone.