Measuring the effectiveness of your website is a must in today’s fast-paced, data-driven world.  If you aren’t keeping tabs on how your users interact with your website, how will you know if they are experiencing problems?  Do you think they will actually pick up the phone to tell you how you can improve their experience? Good luck on that, more likely, they’ve already moved on to your competitor.  What about areas of your website that your visitors find especially useful?  Do you know where you should be investing your website budget to maximize ROI?

If you aren’t measuring and analyzing your website usage, you are effectively wasting valuable data that could help shape the future direction of your website and business.  In fact, we think analyzing your website traffic is so important that we included it in our article, ‘Components of a Website Design & Development Project‘.

As a general practice, we install Google Analytics in every single one of our website design & development projects.  Since we use WordPress for many of them, we decided to build the ultimate WordPress plugin for Installing Google Analytics. Ok, Ok… no, our Google Analytics Plugin for WordPress doesn’t have a bunch of the features that you can find in other analytics plugins, but ours is FAST, SIMPLE, and CLEAN!

Our goal with our Instant Google Analytics plugin for WordPress was to provide the simplest method for installing your Google Analytics Tracking code on your website.  There’s no reason to wait until you have all of your Google Tag Manager settings figured out, or your custom link tagging for Google Analytics.  Start collecting data as soon as possible!  The plugin is extremely light-weight, and won’t bog your WordPress site down with messy code or an over-abundance of dashboard options.

Try it out, and let us know how it works for you, or how we could make improvements!

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Generally, to accomplish this, we perform something similar to the following tasks:

1. Copy all of the files and folders from site-1 to site-2.

2. Create a new mySql database for site-2.

3. Export the mySql database from site-1, and import it into the database for site-2.

4. Edit the database connection info in file ‘wp-config.php’ to access the new database we created for site-2.

At this point, we might think it’s time to view the site, or log in to the administration dashboard to update the permalinks. But remember, the database we copied from site-1 to site-2 contains URL’s for site-1 only.  Our new location is usually a live domain, a temporary URL, a sub-domain, or something else, but it will always be different from the site-1 URL.  Of course we can’t have two sites at www.niceTryGuy.com, so our site wont work yet!

To fix this, there’s a 5th step:

5. Run SQL queries against the site-2 database to update the old URL’s.

Another developer, Gilbert Pellegrom, has a great post where he shares 3 SQL queries to run against the database when moving a WordPress database.  The SQL queries are easy to run, and we could just keep them tucked away in a text file so we can copy/paste them as needed, but we’ll always have to perform the tedious and repetitious task of replacing the old-site and new site URL placeholders with our own URL’s in each query.  Not only is doing so by hand error-prone, but most developers we know HATE doing tedious and repetitive tasks.

So without further ado… let me introduce the “WordPress Tool for fixing URL’s in a MySQL Database“!  (Naming suggestions anyone?)  I built this handy tool to allow us to simply enter the URL’s from both site-1 and site-2, and also the table prefix (if site-1 uses the optional table prefix), to instantly generate the 3 queries needed to clean up our URL’s.

Feel free to bookmark the tool for your own use, or even send me feedback on how it could be improved.

It might not save a ton of time, but anytime we can cut down on repetition, we save ourselves the risk of errors and can quickly move on to more important tasks NOT related to moving a WordPress database.

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