Archived Project: WordPress Portfolio Website
Published on | Portfolio • WordPress • Web Analytics
It's time to say goodbye to an old friend. I’ve officially decided to retire my previous portfolio website hosted at yunasportfolio.com. The free hosting was coming to an end, but more importantly, it served as a great marker for how far I've come.
Working with real clients over the last little while has leveled up my skills significantly. I realized I can now build much better, more modern, highly SEO-friendly, and accessible websites from scratch than I could when I first spun up this old WordPress instance. Still, it was a fantastic playground for learning digital analytics and custom web tracking!
What Was Under the Hood?
This site was built on the default WordPress "Twenty Twenty-Five" theme, but heavily customized with my own HTML5, CSS, JS, and PHP. My primary goal for this site was to act as a sandbox for implementing rigorous analytics and user-behavior tracking.
The tracking stack included Google Tag Manager (GTM), Google Analytics 4 (GA4), Hotjar, and Smartlook. By building and managing this site, I was able to write several in-depth tutorials documenting the complex tracking implementations I figured out along the way. If you're curious about the mechanics behind this old site, you can read the related guides here:
- Tutorial: GTM GDPR-compliant Cookie Banner without Plugins - How I custom-coded my own consent management without relying on heavy third-party plugins.
- Tutorial: How to Track WPForms AJAX Submissions & Subjects in GA4 - Breaking down the AJAX tracking setup used on the site's contact form.
- Switching from "Google Site Kit" to "GTM4WP" - Documenting the shift in my tracking architecture for better flexibility.
While yunasportfolio.com is officially retired, the lessons I learned building it live on here in my new, improved space. Onward and upward! 🚀