This release is mostly a security release. After last months security update we decided to have Sucuri do another in-depth review of the plugin, we found another issue ourselves that was common in many plugins and we were informed of another issue by Jouko. For that reason, you should update immediately. The release contains a few more improvements, which I’ll highlight below.

Use the WP Settings API

When we re-built the Google Analytics plugin end of last year we left one bit of the old code intact: the way it stored settings. We’ve now fully migrated the plugin to use the WordPress Settings API. This makes sure we won’t suffer security issues in our own code as we’re relying on the core code to handle options saving.

More accessible forms

A pull request by Steve Repsher added for attributes to our labels, making them correspond with their form fields. A good accessibility change for which we’re thankful!

Universal is the default

Now that Google Analytics’ Universal rollout has completed, we’ve made Universal the default for all new installs.

Fixed an annoying bug: scripts everywhere

We also fixed an annoying bug in this release. Our plugin was loading its scripts on every page, instead of on just its own pages. This lead to slow loads and annoying interaction problems, those should now all be solved.

This post first appeared as Google Analytics 5.4 release notes on Yoast. Whoopity Doo!