Seven days into daily blogging, my analytics flatlined.

Matomo showed zero visitors. Fathom confirmed the silence. After six days of steady traffic and engagement, Marcus.Blog had apparently become a ghost town overnight.

My first thought: “The honeymoon’s over. Reality has set in. Building an audience for a personal branded blog is harder than I thought.”

That’s when I discovered the real culprit—and why every WordPress user needs to understand how block themes fundamentally change the rules of customisation.

The home.html Disaster

Here’s what happened.

On day one, following my own advice to just start, I’d manually inserted my analytics tracking codes directly into the Twenty Twenty-Five theme’s home.html template file.

Old habits from 16 years of WordPress development. Find the template file, add code, save. Simple.

Except block themes don’t play by classic theme rules.

The Site Editor Surprise

Yesterday, I decided to make a small design tweak to my header. Nothing major—just adjusting some spacing and adding my Gravatar image. So I clicked “Edit Site” in the WordPress admin, made my changes in the visual editor, and saved.

What I didn’t realise: The moment you edit any part of a block theme template through the Site Editor, WordPress creates a new version in the database. Your manual file edits? Gone. Overwritten. Vanished like they never existed.

No warning. No “Hey, you have custom code that will be lost.” Just silence.

And with that silence, my analytics tracking disappeared.

The Block Theme Learning Curve

After developing WordPress sites since 2009—from heavily modified Arras themes to my own Multiplex framework—this was my first real collision with block theme architecture.

Classic themes were predictable. Edit a PHP file, see the changes. Your customisations lived in the filesystem where you put them.

Block themes? They’re database-first. The Site Editor doesn’t care about your manual file edits. It saves its own version to the database, and that version wins. Every time.

This isn’t a bug. It’s the intended behaviour. But for developers used to file-based customisation, it’s a paradigm shift that can bite hard.

Building the Solution

Rather than fighting the system, I decided to work with it. The result: Header Inserts by Solespire, a WordPress plugin that solves this problem permanently.

The concept is simple:

• Store header code in the database (where block themes expect customisations)
• Inject it reliably before </head> on every page load
• Work seamlessly with classic themes, block themes, and hybrids
• Survive theme updates, Site Editor changes, and template modifications

Here’s the key functionality that makes it bulletproof:

// Multiple hooks ensure compatibility across all theme types
add_action('wp_head', array($this, 'output_header_code'), 999);

// For block themes specifically
add_action('wp_enqueue_scripts', array($this, 'ensure_header_output'), 1);

No more lost analytics. No more manual file editing. Just paste your code once, and it persists through every theme change, every Site Editor session, every update.

Why This Matters

This isn’t just about analytics codes. Any header customisation faces the same risk:

• Meta verification tags (Google, Bing, Pinterest)
• Custom CSS snippets
• Schema markup
• Open Graph tags
• Third-party scripts
• Conversion pixels

Every time you edit your site through the visual editor, you’re potentially erasing critical functionality without knowing it.

The Compound Effect of Proper Tools

This experience reinforced something I believe deeply: the right tool at the right time compounds your effectiveness.

I could have:

• Kept manually re-adding code after each edit
• Avoided using the Site Editor entirely
• Switched back to a classic theme
• Used a child theme (which has its own block theme complications)

Instead, I spent some time building a permanent solution. Now, that solution benefits not just me, but every WordPress user facing the same challenge.

That’s compound content creation in action—turning today’s frustration into tomorrow’s freedom.

Your Block Theme Insurance

If you’re using Twenty Twenty-Five or any block theme, you need header injection insurance. Manual file edits are no longer safe. The Site Editor doesn’t respect them, and you’ll lose critical functionality without warning.

Get Header Inserts by Solespire free:

Join the Marcus.Blog Telegram channel and request your copy. I’m giving it away because I know the frustration of lost customisations, and no one should lose analytics data due to architectural surprises.

The Lesson

After 16 years of WordPress development, I’m still learning. Block themes require unlearning old patterns and embracing new approaches.

The manual-edit-everything mindset that served me well since 2009? It’s a liability in the block theme world.

But that’s the beauty of shipping daily—every obstacle becomes an opportunity to build something better.

My analytics are back online. My tracking persists through any edit. And now, yours can too.

Sometimes the best code you write is the code that protects you from your own habits.

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Have you lost customisations to the Site Editor? What other block theme surprises have caught you off guard?