As a blog admin you may need to insert some extra code into the header and/or footer sections of your template, in order to achieve various goals, like, for instance, adding:
- Google AdSense ads scripts
- visitor tracking scripts for Google Analitycs, StatCounter or other similar products
- verification scripts, e.g. For Google Webmaster, TradeDoubler, etc.
- general notes/messages to visitors
- anything else
That can be done by modifying the header and footer php source files of the template you are using. However, that way you have to re-insert the source changes whenever you update your template files due to new versions or you replace your template with another one.
In order to avoid such discomfort, you may wish to use specific plugins instead.
Actually, there are header and footer free plugins that let you insert the code snippets you desire directly into them, without having to modify the template source files. Therefore, you will then be able to install new template versions with no need of modifying them for code snippets reinsertion.
As examples of such plugins, you may wish to have a look and try at ‘Custom Headers and Footers‘ by Daniel Frużyński and ‘Header-Footer‘ by Satollo. I have tested and used both of them, with no problems. You can install them directly from the ‘Plugins/Add New’ entry in your WordPress blog admin page.
