Adding Google Analytics to a Jekyll site with jekyll/minima theme is supposed to be straight forward. Just a single line in your _config.yml file.

Here is the official documentation for jekyll/minima v2.5.1:

To enable Google Analytics, add the following lines to your Jekyll site with your Google Analytics “Measurement Id” (I’ll skip the setup part to get a “Measurement Id”).

google_analytics: UA-NNNNNNNN-N

Google Analytics will only appear in production, i.e., JEKYLL_ENV=production

Did it with this pull request…except that it didn’t work😓. Google Analytics was telling me that:

  • “No data received from your website”
  • or “Data collection isn’t active for your website. If you installed tags more than 48 hours ago, make sure they are setup correctly.”

Then, I started to look for what I was missing.

First of all, I was relying on Github pages out of the box supported theme. I chose the jekyll/minima theme. As of today, the exact version of jekyll/minima used by Github pages is v2.5.1. This information regarding Github pages dependencies versions is available on https://pages.github.com/versions.json:

{
    "jekyll": "3.10.0",
	...
    "minima": "2.5.1",
	...
    "ruby": "3.3.4",
    "github-pages": "232",
	...
}

jekyll/minima theme manages Google Analytics with _includes/google-analytics.html. And let’s just say that _includes/google-analytics.html content doesn’t look like the code snippet recommended by Google Analytics at all.

Code snippet recommended by Google Analytics:

<!-- Google tag (gtag.js) -->
<script async src="https://www.googletagmanager.com/gtag/js?id=G-XXXXXXXXXX"></script>
<script>
  window.dataLayer = window.dataLayer || [];
  function gtag(){dataLayer.push(arguments);}
  gtag('js', new Date());

  gtag('config', 'G-XXXXXXXXXX');
</script>

Code from _includes/google-analytics.html:

<script>
if(!(window.doNotTrack === "1" || navigator.doNotTrack === "1" || navigator.doNotTrack === "yes" || navigator.msDoNotTrack === "1")) {
  (function(i,s,o,g,r,a,m){i['GoogleAnalyticsObject']=r;i[r]=i[r]||function(){
  (i[r].q=i[r].q||[]).push(arguments)},i[r].l=1*new Date();a=s.createElement(o),
  m=s.getElementsByTagName(o)[0];a.async=1;a.src=g;m.parentNode.insertBefore(a,m)
  })(window,document,'script','https://www.google-analytics.com/analytics.js','ga');

    ga('create', '{{ site.google_analytics }}', 'auto');
    ga('send', 'pageview');
}
</script>

Long story short, jekyll/minima@v2.5.1 support for Google analytics is outdated/broken. And lucky me, this has already been fixed by Tiamo Idzenga a year ago!🎉❤️. More details here:

And the fix has been ported in the v2.5-stable branch of jekyll/minima (I didn’t want to switch to v3.x yet).

So now the question is how can I target this fixed version of jekyll/minima? Quite straight forward, it’s already documented by Github pages: https://docs.github.com/en/pages/setting-up-a-github-pages-site-with-jekyll/adding-a-theme-to-your-github-pages-site-using-jekyll. I just need to switch my theme selection to a remote theme with jekyll-remote-theme Jekyll plugin.

To fix my issue, I will therefore switch my theme from the out of the box jekyll/minima theme to a remote theme targetting explicitly jekyll/minima@593a05a.

  • pull request.
  • Changes introduced on _config.yml: 
    -theme: minima
+# Targeting minima theme version in '2.5-stable' branch including the google-analytics.html fix/update.
+remote_theme: jekyll/minima@593a05a2a6426b2f2438e334abf8c8edc80d4624

    +plugins:
+  - jekyll-remote-theme

Et voilà! Data is finally flowing to my Google Analytics, and my Data Stream is now telling me that ✅Data collection is active in the past 48 hours.🥳