How to remove MyBlogLog tracking code from WordPress
July 2, 2011 in blogging
Have you used MyBlogLog in the past to track readers of your WordPress blog? You probably either used a plugin to do the tracking, or perhaps a short snippet of code added to your theme. Although it’s preferable to use the plugin approach, sometimes adding the code was necessary in the past to avoid incompatibilities with other plugins.
Now that Yahoo’s MyBlogLog is no more, you should disable the tracking, no matter which approach you used. If you don’t, your WordPress site is likely to slow down alarmingly, driving away readers. Note that since the tracking code is not normally included in admin pages, the poor performance may only be apparent when viewing the blog, not when using the dashboard.
If you used a plugin, uninstalling the MyBlogLog tracking plugin in the normal way through the dashboard should be straightforward.
If your WordPress site used the code approach to MyBlogLog tracking, you will need to manually edit the theme files to remove the code. Here’s what I did to remove the tracking code:
- Take a backup of your site :-)
- In the dashboard, click on Appearance > Editor in the left sidebar
- Choose the Header file (header.php) in the list of files in the right sidebar
- Scroll down until you find the tag. Just below that you will probably see the tracking code as highlighted in the sample below:
- Delete the highlighted text – ie all the text between and including the script tags. (Note that the id code will be different from that shown. Also, the code may have been inserted in a different file – if you can’t find it in header.php, you will need to browse the theme files to find it.)
- When you are confident you have made an accurate edit without deleting any other code, save your changes.
Disclaimer: since every site is different, I make no guarantee that this will work for your site. This is what worked for me. Remember that manually editing theme files is risky, so make sure you have a back up first and be very careful if you are not familiar with this process!
Roberto said on July 8, 2011
Thanks, I noticed one of my blogs basically stop and hung trying to load mybloglog so I found your post and this worked perfectly.
Thanks for the tip.
Roberto
John said on July 8, 2011
You are a lifesaver-had 7 of my blogs that had this problem,my host company could not work it out,my blogs took ages to open and I was losing heaps of sales as people would not wait for page to open-can not thank you enough.
mai said on July 11, 2011
Thanks for this! I added it before and forgot where it was.
Kris said on July 12, 2011
Thank you for the tip Paul! I did exactly what you suggested all is fine now. My blog loads a lot faster now. I used this tool to test the speed: http://tools.pingdom.com
Elan Chalford said on July 13, 2011
Thank you so much. I was on the brink of despair. After much hard work the site was on the first page of Google for “fiddle tune”….but it would not load.
Now it is healed of the mybloglog curse.
H is for Home (Adelle) said on August 8, 2011
Thanks so much for this post! Our blog suddenly started hanging and I couldn’t work out how to get rid of the mybloglog code.
Sherry said on August 8, 2011
Thank you so much for this info! I fixed the stupid slow load!
Tefft, Sarah said on September 15, 2011
Thanks for this article Paul, it helps me a lot. I’ve been looking for this kind of tips thanks again.
Cheers!