Measure Page and Website Loading Speed in Google Analytics

You can now measure the loading time of your pages and overall website inside Google Analytics. The time your pages take to load and the overall responsiveness of your site are critical in terms of usability, conversions, SEO (Search Engine Optimization) and CPC (Cost Per Click). So it is great to be able to measure this.

Loading speed is also an important factor in how your website ranks in Google organic (free) search results and landing pages that are slow to load impacts your Google AdWords Quality Score.




Using these new reports you will be able to quickly identify slow loading pages and differences in loading speed for your various marketing campaigns, geographic areas and even website browsers. Moving forward you can work with your web developers to ensure visitors have an enhanced experience.



You can also look for a correlation between conversions (or conversion rate) and loading speed. If loading time is impacting heavily on your objectives then it is definitely worth knowing about!

Setting up Site Speed in Google Analytics

If you have logged into Google Analytics you will notice your Site Speed report is full of zeros, this is because you will need to make a change to your Google Analytics tracking code in order to get data into the reports.

You will need to add the following line to your Google Analytics tracking code;

_gaq.push(['_trackPageLoadTime']);

So the following default code;

<script type="text/javascript">
 var _gaq = _gaq || [];
  _gaq.push(['_setAccount', 'UA-XXXXX-X']);
  _gaq.push(['_trackPageview']);
  
 (function() {
   var ga = document.createElement('script'); ga.type = 'text/javascript'; ga.async = true;
   ga.src = ('https:' == document.location.protocol ? 'https://ssl' : 'http://www') + '.google-analytics.com/ga.js';
   var s = document.getElementsByTagName('script')[0]; s.parentNode.insertBefore(ga, s);
 })();
</script>

Would become;

<script type="text/javascript">
 var _gaq = _gaq || [];
  _gaq.push(['_setAccount', 'UA-XXXXX-X']);
  _gaq.push(['_trackPageview']);
  _gaq.push(['_trackPageLoadTime']);
  
 (function() {
   var ga = document.createElement('script'); ga.type = 'text/javascript'; ga.async = true;
   ga.src = ('https:' == document.location.protocol ? 'https://ssl' : 'http://www') + '.google-analytics.com/ga.js';
   var s = document.getElementsByTagName('script')[0]; s.parentNode.insertBefore(ga, s);
 })();
</script>

This code is for the latest version of the Google Analytics tracking code, known as 'asynchronous' or 'async'. If you are using the traditional or legacy tracking code you can find details in the Google Analytics support article.

If you have customized your tracking code then make sure those customizations are reflected in the change (for example if you are tracking into multiple accounts).

Extra Google Analytics Site Speed Resources:

• Site Speed announcement on the Google Analytics Blog
• Google Analytics Site Speed help documentation
• Impacts of loading speed on Google organic (free) search results
• Impacts of loading speed on Google AdWords Quality Score