should Google Analytics be added to localhost?

Hi @ian000bell

No, you shouldn’t install it anywhere except the live site.

This means each time I migrate the website from development to production environment that I have to re-install Google Analytics. Thanks for the answer.

Ian

Yes, you will have to do that if your workflow includes migrating dev install to production install like that.

You can alternatively also add the code with a condition like:

if (strpos($_SERVER['HTTP_HOST'], 'livesite.com') !== false) {
    ?>
    Google analytics code comes here
    <?php
}

If you are in need of doing that for a bunch of things, then I personally do it via config file, as in I use a special version of wp-config.php and load credentials from another file which it loads, but on the basis of the filename, it knows whether its in production or staging or local environment.

Explained here – https://wordpress.stackexchange.com/questions/52682/best-practice-for-versioning-wp-config-php/53014#53014