Day 2, google tag manager vs hardcoding tags

Well, thanks to analytics mania I learned that using google tag manager seems to increase performance vs simply hardcoding the tags in the page header.

In the end, there are only three ways of adding a tag to a website:

  • hardcode (type) it in the website header code. Disadvantage: you need to code or rely on a developer for every change.
  • add it through the WordPress interface, when “customizing the theme”, there’s a place where you can add “additional html or CSS” text. Disadvantage: if you change themes, you likely have to re-paste the tags, I suppose.
  • use a “Tag manager” which is fired upon page load and fetches the tags in the list. I thought this solution would be slower vs hardcoding because it’s essentially bringing on a third party, but thanks to the link above, it seems it isn’t, at least when that tag manager is Google’s.

Guess who’s gonna set up a Google tags manager?