If you’ve been a former user of the classic Google Analytics Dashboard for WordPress (GADWP) plugin, there are now 2 community forks in its place!
This is a public service announcement.
For those who don’t know….the beloved GADWP plugin was recently taken over by and disgustingly commercialized by ExactMetrics (it’s new name), which turned it into an expensively-priced plugin. What used to be such a great simple little plugin to show Google Analytics stats from your Dashboard and had nearly a perfect 5-star rating suddenly tanked to 2 stars overnight due to hundreds of 1-star reviews.
What many people don’t know is that the former version of GADWP has since been kept alive and forked to different names and maintained by different developers. If you’ve been using GADWP and felt sad about ExactMetrics, just know that you can get more or less of the old plugin in other alternatives today:
FORK #1 – GAinWP
Clever name that reminds you of the old name and works just the same. Has a perfect 5-star rating out of many reviews. Absolutely fantastic and looks great. Clean, simple, useful.
FORK #2 – Metrics Query
This one is run by Yehuda Hassine. He’s also done great work reviving other abandoned plugins as well, like “Post SMTP Mailer” which was formerly “WP Postman”. I tried this one but it created an error on my site. I’m sure he’ll be fixing it soon.
How badly does GAinWP slow down the site? I’d really rather not have unnecessary plugins at all (everything is observable through GA itself), but the data is so much cleaner in GAinWP. Only question is the effect on speed. Any data?
GAinWP should be fine. Any slowdowns would be on the backend only not much effect if you’re on a smaller site.
Btw Johnny which plugin do you use for “NOTIFY ME OF FOLLOW-UP COMMENTS VIA E-MAIL”? I’m still using the Subscribe to Comments Reloaded, I’m sure you did your homework and picked the best one 😉
Hahahah. I use this abandoned one. We hacked it ourselves although I can’t remember if it’s hacked on this particular site. https://wordpress.org/plugins/comment-reply-notification/
Release for your loyal followers as a public plugin <3 😉
Hahaha, ok. I’ll get to it at some point. There’s still 3-4 more in queue right now and taking forever. Arghhhhh.
I’m not even sure mine is the absolute best one now. The one I chose was from 10 years ago, ahhaha. And I like it for its simplicity. I don’t want crazy bloated options/features and upsell nags.
Hi Johnny,
I really appreciate the mention of Metrics Query and Post SMTP.
The plugin is working with no issues – everyone welcome to download it.
Hey man, thank YOU! The community appreciates your work very much.