Secure (SSL) Google Analytics

By  on  

Google Analytics is a tremendous tool, especially when your customer wants an eCommerce website. Analytics is even more powerful when your customer uses Adwords to drive in traffic.

Google provides the following code for you to add to your page footer so that Analytics can grab statistics:


The problem with this is that if you're pulling this code in on a secure page, a security warning will pop up mentioning that the page is loading both secure and non-secure items. How do you prevent this issue (as well as trust issues with the user)? Simply import the secure version of Google Analytics:


For websites that have some pages secure and others not HTTPS protected, I recommend always calling the secure version of Google Analytics' urchin.js.

Recent Features

  • By
    How to Create a Twitter Card

    One of my favorite social APIs was the Open Graph API adopted by Facebook.  Adding just a few META tags to each page allowed links to my article to be styled and presented the way I wanted them to, giving me a bit of control...

  • By
    I’m an Impostor

    This is the hardest thing I've ever had to write, much less admit to myself.  I've written resignation letters from jobs I've loved, I've ended relationships, I've failed at a host of tasks, and let myself down in my life.  All of those feelings were very...

Incredible Demos

  • By
    CSS Transforms

    CSS has become more and more powerful over the past few years and CSS transforms are a prime example. CSS transforms allow for sophisticated, powerful transformations of HTML elements.  One or more transformations can be applied to a given element and transforms can even be animated...

  • By
    The Simple Intro to SVG Animation

    This article serves as a first step toward mastering SVG element animation. Included within are links to key resources for diving deeper, so bookmark this page and refer back to it throughout your journey toward SVG mastery. An SVG element is a special type of DOM element...

Discussion

  1. Nice post! Google Analytics has a new tracking code option, ga.js instead of the urchin.js, that handles the ssl component. Here’s a look:

    var gaJsHost = (("https:" == document.location.protocol) ? "https://ssl." : "http://www.");
    document.write(unescape("%3Cscript src='" + gaJsHost + "google-analytics.com/ga.js' type='text/javascript'%3E%3C/script%3E"));
    
    
    var pageTracker = _gat._getTracker("UA-xxxxxxx-x");
    pageTracker._initData();
    pageTracker._trackPageview();
    
    
  2. muddy

    The answer to my ssl headaches! Didn’t think to check if Google Analytics offered a secure tracking code. Will be so happy to say goodbye to that annoying “non-secure” pop-up.

    Thank ya thank ya thank ya.

Wrap your code in <pre class="{language}"></pre> tags, link to a GitHub gist, JSFiddle fiddle, or CodePen pen to embed!