To improve the performance of your pages, you first need to measure and diagnose the speed of a page, which can be a difficult task. Furthermore, even with page speed measurements, it’s critical to look at page speed in context of other web analytics data.
Therefore, we are thrilled to announce the availability of the Site Speed report in the
new Google Analytics platform . With the Site Speed report you can measure the page load time across your site.
Uses for the Site Speed Report
Content: Which landing pages are slowest? Traffic sources: Which campaigns correspond to faster page loads overall? Visitor: How does page load time vary across geographies? Technology: Does your site load faster or slower for different browsers? One effective use of the Site Speed report is to measure speed for your most critical pages. For example, you might learn that the target audience of your site is located in a geographic region that experiences slower page speed. Or, you might learn that certain pages on your site run slower in some browsers. In addition to the Site Speed report, we’ve created a custom report that you can use to help answer these questions:
view the Site Speed custom report .
Setting up the Site Speed Report
By default, page speed measurement is turned off, so you’ll only see 0’s in the Site Speed report until you’ve enabled it. To start measuring site speed, you need to make a small change to your Analytics tracking code. We have detailed instructions in the
Site Speed article in the Analytics Help Center . Once you’ve updated your tracking code, a small sample of pageviews will be used to calculate the page load time.
We’re excited to bring this important metric into Google Analytics as part of the new Google Analytics platform. Please continue to
send us feedback on Site Speed and the rest of the new Google Analytics.
By Zhiheng Wang, Phil Mui on behalf of the Google Analytics team and the Make the Web Faster team.
Posted by Trevor Claiborne, Google Analytics Team
