The course will teach you – in around an hour – how to migrate your Universal Analytics accounts to Google Analytics 4 in an easy-to-follow, repeatable process. The course includes our Google Analytics 4 Migration Checklist below, along with a total of 14 lessons.

Grab a copy our Google Analytics 4 Migration Training Course today so you don’t have to sweat it when Google turns off Universal Analytics in a few months from now.!

Zoom to HubSpot Option 1: Use the Zoom registration page

If you use the Zoom default registration page, you can avoid having to setup a form, a anding page and a thank you page in HubSpot. To use this approach, you create a workflow and use the Zoom registration as the trigger for the workflow.

Once you’ve done this, you can then set your own workflow for sending emails, etc. prior to the webinar.

Note: with this approach all of the standard Zoom emails will be sent (registration confirmation, reminders, etc).

Zoom to HubSpot Option 2: Use HubSpot for the Registration and/or Emails

If you want to use HubSpot to handle the landing page and the thank you page, you need to first create a registration form. Once you create the form, the next step is to create a workflow. Start the workflow based on the form submission.

And then add the “Add Contact to Zoom Webinar” action. Once you’ve done that, submissions to your form will now be pushed to Zoom.

Note that when you take this approach, Zoom will STILL send out the standard zoom emails as above.

So if you’d like to handle all of the emails on your own, you can go to the webinar’s email settings and edit the particular email you want to change, and disable the email.

Hope that helps!

Here’s what you need to know:

1. GA3 will stop recording data in July, 2023 – so after that time you won’t get any new data.
2. There are other alternatives to Google Analytics 4 but we recommend that you stick with Google Analytics since most of the website across the planet use it.
3. GA4 is very e-commerce oriented and it’s a lot different than GA3, but at its core GA4 serves the same function of GA3, and it’s the recommended approach to website analytics.

If you need a service to help you with the migration, please reach out to our parent company Short Hills Design, as we offer professional google analytics 4 migration services.

Let us know if you have any questions or feedback, and thanks for stopping by!

My Issue: BackupBuddy Backups were not Completing on GoDaddy Shared Hosting

I’m writing this post because BackupBuddy backups were timing out on one of our client’s GoDaddy shared hosting plan.  We love GoDaddy for domains, but not so much for hosting (but I digress).
IThemes.com (the makers of BackupBuddy) replied promptly to my support ticket and gave me the following advice — which worked perfectly!
Here are the steps iThemes.com support gave me to try to make BackupBuddy work with GoDaddy shared hosting — and it worked.

1. Settings->Advanced, Zip section
2. Enable Zip compression
3. Select Alternate Zip System
4. Set Zip Build Strategy to Multi-burst/Multi-step
5. Set Max time per chunk to 90 (seconds)
6. Set Max content size for a single burst to 20 (MB) – leave Min at default 10

So if you are using GoDaddy shared hosting and having an issue with BackupBuddy, try the above to see if it works for you!
Oh, and here’s our “How to Get Backup Buddy” video with our affiliate link — just for kicks.
You can find it here.
Note that the plan you will now need (if you have <=2 sites) is the “Blogger” plan.

For those of us who were used to pasting LD+JSON schema into a script tag in Google Tag Manager, we awoke one day to find out that this approach no longer worked.  Regardless of the reason why, you can still add your schema markup to GTM, but you have to wrap in in a Javascript function.
Remember, once you have the function, you still have to add it to GTM as a custom html tag.
The video below details how you do it (it’s easy), and below that is the code for you to copy to use:

<script>
(function(){
var data ={
// INSERT LD+JSON MARKUP HERE
};
var script = document.createElement('script');
script.type = 'application/ld+json';
script.innerHTML = JSON.stringify( data );
document.getElementsByTagName('head')[0].appendChild(script);
})(document);
</script>

Hat-tip to @simoahava for his advice on the tag manager product forum!

1. In the LeadPages editor, head to your Page Settings:

2. Then navigate to the Analytics tab:

3. Leave the tracking ID section blank, and add your custom code to the box below:

Note this is the new gtag.js code.  And here’s the code itself to copy and paste:  (please note that this is a work in progress, and you might find a better way. SHD makes no guarantees for the code below. Use at your own risk).

<!-- Global site tag (gtag.js) - Google Analytics -->
<script async src="https://www.googletagmanager.com/gtag/js?id=UA-XXXXXX-XX"></script>
<script>
window.dataLayer = window.dataLayer || [];
function gtag(){dataLayer.push(arguments);}
gtag('js', new Date());

gtag('config', 'UA-XXXXXX-XX', {
'page_title' : 'your page title here',
'page_path': '/somePath'
});
</script>

Apache2.4 and LAMP Stack Diagnostic Steps for WordPress Errors

Here’s how I diagnosed my WordPress errors, and I’m hoping it will help someone else do the same. Please understand that I’m NOT a professional CentOS  admin — I’m a working user that knows how to do what I need to do — so your mileage my vary.  And of course, please BACKUP anything and everything before you make system changes.

Have a full-time 500 error? This article assumes that you are dealing with a situation where your WordPress sites behaves strangely – sometimes – meaning that if you load your site and you’re always getting a 500 server error, then it’s likely an issue with your .htaccess configuration.

WordPress Goes Up, WordPress Goes Down

The first thing you need to determine is what’s causing the problem. I’m also a dentist and the most important thing I do all day is determine WHAT caused my patient’s problem — if I don’t know WHY something happened, then I can’t fix it. [You could always adjust the wp-config.php debug setting to true which is fine for a single site or two, but if you have multiple sites, it will take a lot of time to turn debug on and then off for all of these sites.]

Check the Apache logs first to try to determine the scope of the problem

The first place I looked was the Apache log for the entire server, because I wanted to see if the problem was happening on many accounts, or just a few. If there was a problem at the Apache level, then it’s likely that many, if not all the accounts would be affected, and not just a few.

You can find that log here /etc/apache2/logs/error_log .  The first time you look at the log your eyes will fall out of your head (if you haven’t looked at one before) and there are plenty of tutorials about how to read these logs, so I won’t rehash all that here. But what I will tell you is that there are many online services that will let you upload the logs (which loosely speaking, “translates” the logs into more of a table so you can see what’s going on, and eliminate the data you don’t need to look at).  I found that loggly.com and sumologic.com were really good for this. I used the free versions and I downloaded the log from the server, and uploaded it to the services and did my digging.

From my very superficial digging, I saw that only a few accounts were affected – that is, in this specific instance, I kept seeing the same accounts pop up over and over again in the log. I still wasn’t sure what the problem was, but I used the loggly.com and the sumologic.com tools to help sort the log data so I could organize the data.  Once I saw that the errors were linked to specific accounts, I then looked at these accounts in particular.

Check the PHP Error logs next

While you can pull apache logs for just a single user, I used the entire server log in the step above because I didn’t want to be too focused in my initial search. If I looked at the Apache logs for 3 accounts and all three had issues, I might mistakenly conclude that Apache is the issue. So by looking at the entire Apache log first, I was able to narrow down my focus.

So I went to each site individually and I look at the PHP Error log. In this instance we were using cPanel, and the error log is here:  /logs/[username].php.error.log.  Again, this is a fairly complex chunk of data to look at so I used the above tools again to help organize it. In this case, I started by searching the data for only those entries that showed a fatal PHP error.  Of course PHP warnings are important, too, but fatal errors need to be addressed first.

Review the PHP Errors

If you do a search for fatal php errors and you come up empty, then I can’t help you here (sorry about that).  But since your WordPress install is behaving erratically (or you wouldn’t be reading this), and your Apache logs point to only a few sites, then it’s likely that you’ll find a fatal php error.  And now that you’ve found the error, it’s likely that you can now troubleshoot that error specifically, whether it’s a variant of a PHP-FPM max workers error such as server reached MaxRequestWorkers , or  the dreaded Allowed memory size of 1234567 bytes exhausted (tried to allocate 1234567)… error.

You can now do a search for the solution to your specific problem, and in a nutshell, the allowed memory error likely requires you to boost the memory setting in php.ini and/or wp-config.php, and the max workers issue is something to discuss with your host, as it has to do with how many PHP-FPM process can run at once.  Sometimes you just need more RAM on your server, but before you spend money on RAM, you need to diagnose the problem.

I think I fixed it – what’s next?

Once you fix the error, you need to go back into the logs to see if the error is gone (and assuming your site is loading properly now). Though if your site was going up and down, you might be looking at the site at a “good time” so you do need to look at logs to see if the problem is persisting.  One option is to grab the log files again at a later time, and run through the same steps to upload and analyze the log files.  This approach is certainly a good one, but wouldn’t it be nice to have all of your relevant logs automagically pulled from your server(s) to somewhere where you can look at them all at once — in real time and historically? Yeah. It is.

After figuring out by hand what was wrong with my site, I decided to give automagic-log-pulling (is that a new phrase?) a try. And while loggly and sumologic.com can handle this task, I ended up trying out elastic.co for my needs simply because they had the lowest price point, and I was able to setup the service very quickly and easily. That’s not to say that loggly and sumologic aren’t good products –they just felt to me more enterprise-like, and if I had 5,000 sites with TBs of logs, I might have gone in that direction.

In the next post I’m going to talk about how I setup Elastic.co to pull specific logs from my servers and the saved sorts I now use to check-in on my boxes.

Note: I have no affiliate relationship with any provider listed above, and I am not being paid or otherwise compensated for this post. The opinions expressed above are entirely my own.

If you are here you already know why we are using Mailgun with WordPress, so we’ll skip that.

Mailgun DNS Records Won’t Verify!

I tried a number of solutions to get mailgun to verify my DNS records and it was a nightmare guessing game. That being said, I figured it out.

A quick note on SPF records before we continue:

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SPF Records and Subdomains vs. Single Domain

You cannot have two SPF records for a single domain, meaning that this below is not allowed:

somedomain.com txt  "v=spf1 include:somedomain.com ~all"
somedomain.com txt  "v=spf1 include:anotherdomain.com~all"

However, you can combine the records into one record:

somedomain.com txt spf "v=spf1 include:somedomain.com include:anotherdomain.com ~all:

But know that subdomains can have their own SPF records so that this below is allowed:

somedomain.com txt  "v=spf1 include:somedomain.com ~all"
subdomain.com txt somedomain.com txt  "v=spf1 include:otherdomain.com ~all"

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Here’s what you have to do to make it work (assuming you are using mg.mydoman.com with Mailgun):

1. create the new subdomain in cPanel (or in whatever manner you use to create subdomains)
2. mailgun is then going to tell you that you need to add an SPF record for:  mg.mydomain.com.  The problem is that (at least in WHM’s edit dns feature) — you need to leave out the trailing “mydomain.com”
3. [box style=”1″]
   

   Your SPF Record for Mailgun should look like this:

   mg txt "v=spf1 include:mailgun.org~all"

   and NOT

   mg.mydomain.com txt "v=spf1 include:mailgun.org~all"

   [/box]

4. The same thing now applies for the DKIM. Mailgun will tell you to use:

   krs._domainkey.mg.mydomain.com

   but what you need to use is this:

   krs._domainkey.mg

Once I realized the error I was making and made these changes, my domain verified instantly.

Hope this helps!

Why I’m Pulling my Affiliate Business from Hostgator

As the owner of a web development and SEO firm for dentists and physicians, I am very careful with which services I recommend to my clients. Without getting into the weeds about the specific issues that my clients had, the larger issue is broken promises from management at Hostgator.
Early in January (or thereabouts) the new affiliate program manager sent out an email to all of the affiliates explaining to us how there was a new affiliate regime at Hostgator, and how he is looking to reach out and work with the affiliates. I even sent him a thank you email about how the personal touch was welcoming.

Then it all hit the fan. I had a client who had a problem that we were able to resolve, but I emailed this affiliate manager that I had an URGENT problem and I never received a reply. I sent a follow-up email and never received a reply.

I spoke two Hostgator reps and explained the situation – I left two messages with them for him and I never received a reply. One representative incredulously asked me, “Since we solved the client’s problem, why do you want to talk to him?”. I explained since he made the offer of “being there” for affiliates when they needed him, then he needs to live up to his promises.

Avoid Hostgator’s Affiliate Program – In MY opinion

While all of the support that I have historically received fro Hostgator’s tech team has been excellent, and while their shared service has been reliable, I simply cannot work with a firm where management is disingenuous.

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Note to the Hostgator affiliate program manager: 

When you promise your affiliates that you will be there if they have a problem, you need to make good on your promises. When it hit the fan I needed your help – and not only were you unavailable, you didn’t reply to emails and you didn’t have a phone number for me to reach you.
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As far as I’m concerned, the one of the most important measures of a company isn’t how nice they are when they are selling you a product, but how helpful they are when you are in a jam. And that’s where Hostgator’s top management failed, — and lost my trust and with that, my business.