Installation

Thanks for opening a support topic. To answer your question based on a typical site setup with a staging site the plugin should be installed on your production site first. Your site must be live and publicly accessible in order for data to be collected on your site visits. After doing so you can install the helper plugin which you referenced and once setup correctly following this guide your data from your production site will be displayed on your staging environment (using your dev or stg subdomains).

In your case it sounds like you’re overwriting your production site each time. If you want to share details of how you’re doing so we’d be happy to check. We’d need to know are all your files overwritten, do you push plugin updates manually or are you using a particular plugin or service to push these updates? Providing your domain remains unchanged and the access tokens for a connected user remain intact Site Kit should remain working as normal.

Furthermore, we have pre-existing Google Analytics code on our site — I am assuming that should be removed before installing Site Kit?

This does not need to be removed before setting up Site Kit. The plugin can recognize existing snippets placed and therefore not insert the Analytics snippets if a user chooses to use that existing manually place snippet.

Right, all the plugins are added in the WordPress Admin interface. The site gets overwritten each time. So would the solution be to install WordPress in our development environment, and then go through the installation flow each time we push to production? It seems tedious but I don’t know that there’s another way, given the way we push the site up.

Sorry, by “install WordPress” I meant “install Site Kit.”

You’ll need to install Site Kit on your live (production) site with the correct domain name. After doing if you’re looking to view statistics from your development environment (based on data going to your live site) you can setup your development site as a staging site.

Depending on how your site is overwritten you may need to setup Site Kit each time on your live site. If when you push your updates from development to production only updates files or database records are pushed there may be no action required, providing your WordPress constants remain the same. So really it depends on what get’s overwritten or updated for each update.

For additional information Site Kit users a proxy based service to connect a users site to the various Google services. If a user uninstalls Site Kit while the plugin and various services remain connected (ie. they didn’t reset or disconnect from Site Kit within the plugin) then upon installing the plugin once more services will remain connected. Users don’t need to go though the setup process once more. For that reason you may wish to have Site Kit installed but not setup within the plugin on your development site. You’ll then only need to setup the plugin each time using the same Google account on your live site.

Let me know if you have any more questions on the above.

@jintellect As we haven’t received a response, I’ll mark this as resolved. Feel free to open a new support topic if you continue to encounter issues, or reopen this topic and we’d be happy to assist. Thank you!