Question: analyticsjs-boilerplate vs gtag? or with gtag? about analyticsjs-boilerplate

[philipwalton]

gtag was released without support for most of the advanced analytics.js features this boilerplate uses (e.g. tasks and plugins), so if you like these features then I wouldn't recommending using gtag.

The other thing to be aware of about gtag is it's not really an analytics.js replacement, it's a wrapper library on top of analytics.js (and others), meaning the gtag library still needs to load analytics.js, and it needs to convert all relevant gtag commands to analytics.js commands and run them.

As of right now, gtag is 54.5K and analytics.js is 33.7K, and since gtag will also load analytics.js, it's 262% more code for less functionality. There's also the problem that gtag is site-specific (because you add your tracking ID as a query string), so it's unlikely your users will have it cached; analytics.js on the other hand is used all over the web, so it's very likely to already be in your visitors cache when they load your site.

So, for all these reasons, I don't plan to switch to gtag as it'll just end up making my site take longer to load and consume more of my user's bandwidth.

[Westbrook]

Thanks @philipwalton! Very helpful in better understanding the goals of your boilerplate and the realities around gtag. Keep up the great work.