Every site needs to track traffic, therefore Google Analytics is here. The best free useful tracking software from Google! When you were registered and got a WordPress site, the coming question, where is the best place to insert google analytics code especially in WordPress? Is the best place header or footer?
Google recommendations:
Paste it into your web page, just before the closing </head> tag. One of the main advantages of the asynchronous snippet is that you can position it at the top of the HTML document. This increases the likelihood that the tracking beacon will be sent before the user leaves the page. It is customary to place JavaScript code in the <head> section, and we recommend placing the snippet at the bottom of the <head> section for best performance.
Google recommend to putting your Google Analytics code in WordPress just before the closing </head> tag and this is the best place. To add the code edit the header.php in /wp-content/themes/your_theme/ and put the code into.
The code in <head> will add a little latency but Google Analytics code in the footer will reduce the number of pageviews recorded at some small margin.
The Google Analytics tracking code looks like:
<!-- Global site tag (gtag.js) - Google Analytics -->
<script async src="https://www.googletagmanager.com/gtag/js?id=YOUR_ID"></script>
<script>
window.dataLayer = window.dataLayer || [];
function gtag(){dataLayer.push(arguments);}
gtag('js', new Date());
gtag('config', 'YOUR_ID');
</script>
Bonus:
To adding your Google Analytics code in the <head> also comes with the added benefit of being able to verify Google Search Console without any other manual verification methods.
