Improving site speed is crucially important, Craig at Distilled recently wrote a phenomenal post site speed for dummies which really breaks down WHY improving site speed is a high ROI activity and there was a great Youmoz post recently published which explains HOW to improve page load speed: Optimizing Page Speed - Actionable Tips For SEOs and Web Developers.
So understandably when Google Analytics released a new feature that lets you track your pages load speed right within their interface I got crazy excited. This is huge news and I think is another big win for Google pushing people to create faster websites. It was so exciting I really couldn't contain myself when I heard the news - here's my tweet stream:
SEOmoz Data
As soon as I heard the news I grabbed Casey and got him to install the required snippet of code on the SEOmoz site so we can start tracking our load speed. Thanks to Casey moving on this so quickly we have results from about a day and a half of tracking. Here's the data page by page:
And here's the summary stats for the same time period:
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As you can see, our load speed is varying quite wildly but I think this is largely down to the small sample size. That said, we clearly have some work to do. When you add this tracking code it actually makes another call to the GA servers so it slows your page down a tiny bit and therefore it only fires on a sample of you traffic. Explained here:
Be aware that enabling Site Speed tracking for your site results in an extra request made to the Google Analytics servers, separate from the page tracking GIF request made for pageviews. To minimize impact on overall site latency, this request is sent only on a sampling of pageviews to your site. For this reason, you might not always see the site speed GIF request when attempting to debug this feature in Firebug or other tools. This is normal and expected.
Why this is important
Here's just a few reasons this is big news and some of the things I'm really looking forward to playing around with. You can now:
- Track load speed by page type easily and efficiently
- Measure the impact of load speed on conversion rates
- Calculate load speed for pages behind a login
- Segment load speed by user-type (i.e. custom variables) such as registered and non-registered users
- Analyze load speed by geographic region, browser, etc
Supporting Resources
- A great post by optimisation beacon (where I first saw the news)
- The official Google blog post
- Adding page load speed code to a wordpress blog
Has anyone else been able to install the code? What are you seeing? I'd love for you to share screenshots in the comments below!
Thinking of attending a conference anytime soon? You should definitely check out the Distilled Pro Seminar in Boston 16th/17th May and the SEOmoz Mozcon in Seattle July 27th - 29th.
Thank you for the timely post after the release of page speed in GA.
I have seen crazy high loading times on some of our websites; up to 41 seconds. Although there definitely are sample size biases, it's a good reminder that not everyone has a fast internet connection.
Imagine browsing the web at 40 seconds per page. That gives a maximum of 1900 page views if you are surfing 24 hours a day :)
I am really glad you pointed this out (page load time will of course be slow for someone using a slow connection no matter how well optimised your site is) - I was scratching my head there for a while thinking 'There is *no* way some fo these figures can be right'...
Great post. Google really seems to be pushing page speed lately. Do you think they will be increasing the importance in the algo? or is it just to enhance the user experience?
Very difficult to say, independent of this change I think Google will start incorporating site speed into their algorithms more and more. They want the web to be quick and if they serve up slow sites it's a poor user experience.
I understood that Google already incorporated page speed into their algo.
Yes, it's already in the algo - what I meant was that it would become a bigger factor. It's only a marginal factor at the moment.
There's some interesting technical details about how page load speed is tracked in the comments here:
https://www.blogger.com/comment.g?blogID=3580069&postID=1631470110961520454
In particular, this one:
"Hey, guys - thank you for your interest in this feature and we very much appreciate your feedback so we can improve. Here are some technical details underneath the Site Speed report.
1) The page load time measurement starts at the beginning of the navigation, e.g., a user click, and ends at the document's load event.
2) Page load time is measured using the NavigationTiming interface, if available. In older browsers, it seeks help from other interfaces from Chrome or the Google IE toolbar.
3) The page load sample is based on visit. The sampling rate is fixed at 10% for now. And please do keep in mind that speed is only measured when appropriate browser supports are found.
4) Page load time is not yet available in advanced segment. We will update when things change.Hope these clarify a few things.
cheers,zhiheng"
This is fantastic. Do you know how Google calculates the total time taken?
Is it the time period between when you initialize a page (a call to Google somewhere in the header) up until the page renders completely (another call to Google in the footer),
or
Is it the time between when you make a request to a server and then that page renders completely? I'd love a tool that measures the server processing time AND the page rendering time (I've seen pages that take 10 seconds to return a reply but then render in a second. If you don't include what's going on on the server and look strictly at the data Google is showing you, you might be mistakenly concluding your site is fine...)
Weird - if I segment by browser type I get this -
Chrome - 1.81s - 1,168 views - 23 samples
Internet Explorer - 1.45s - 5,745 views - 120 samples
Firefox - 0s - 1,885 views - 0 samples
I wonder why it's not recording page load speed for Firefox users?
Indeed, it seems Firefox is not compatible with the way Google tracks loading speed.
I'd love they find a way to do so!
Just in case anyone was wondering like myself, you have to enable the new version of Google Analytics to be able to see this, under the Content tab.
This really is huge. Before this you had 3 choices for measuring the performance of your site:
It's nice to see Google adding big features to analytics.
I'm a little curious as to why google decided to require a seperate function call with this as opposed to implementing it universally through the initial Analytics call. I would think it would have been faster and more efficient, and really, who wouldn't want to see this in their standard reports?
That said, it's nice of google to finally put this in, since it's been a ranking factor for a while.
I was wondering the same thing. It would have been nice to just automatically include this, rather than having to go back and edit tracking code on all my sites, but the value of the information makes its worth it in the end.
Maybe some sites are already using another method to track page load speeds, that's why it optional. Also on say an e-commerce site it would make sense to only track product pages once rather than all of them
Not 100% sure about this but I think that tracking loading speed might increase, maybe by very very little, the loading speed itself so they wouldn't want to force this to everyone.
Someone might not want to track it!
I alwyas thought page load speed could affect your rankings. Just on question what if a significant proportion of your uses still have dialup / super slow broad band? Does that really knock you down or does Google realise they have a slow connection to start with and disregard them / reduce the weight of their speed test?
New Version Google Analytics have lot of options intrused. tracking based on country and city and page based on web pages links so on..
Thanks for the post. While page speed is a HUGE factor, I have noticed many sites cutting corners, for lack of better words, and creating a fast site, but it is not very user friendly. There definitely has to be a balance.
Very handy, i was aware that this had an effect but now you can meassure it allows for vast improvements. Yahire
I don't necessarily see this as a good thing. You're basically handing over tangible data regarding your site's performance over to Google from which they can use to penalize your rankings. I know they SAY they don't use Analytics data as a metric to determine your rankings, but if they're placing more weight on page speed, the most accurate data they can use is going to come from Analytics. The only other known method is to rely on the people who use the Google toolbar, which gives erratic results at best.
I don't agree. I've compared our Analytics results with the loading speed already provided at Webmaster Tools and they seem pretty accurate.
That means Google already has this information, they are now giving you more details.
What was the accuracy rating, high, medium or low?
BTW in my case it's never accurate. 20 seconds to load my site, seriously? While according to Page Speed and Yslow it's closer to 3 seconds. Yes, I really trust Google to get my speed metrics right so they can delist what they think is the slowest site on the web. Pass. :-P
I just wrote an article on ugc that may be helpful for anyone wanting to get their page loading speeds down.
https://www.seomoz.org/ugc/optimizing-page-speed-actionable-tips-for-seos-and-web-developers
Hey Ed, I gave you a link right at the top of the post already!
Sorry Tom, completly missed it :) The long week finally catching up with me!
Thanks for the mention!
This was a much needed feature on analytics, rather than having to use firefox extensions
Great improvement. cheers for the info.
It'll be interesting to see how this impacts Pingdom
What do you mean? Think this might impact Pingdom script in any way?
How cool. Now to install on all the sites. Doh!
Website Usebility factors are top priorites for google, do not surprised if google incorporated more user experience facto in it's alog in near future.
Hi Tom. This post really came in time. I read the new about that new feature but didn't take the time to implement the code in some accounts. Now you pushed me to do it and I am looking forward to the results.
The hints from Google regarding site speed are getting more and more obvious!
Thank u for this timely post. do you know the trend of Google optimization in the future! i think facebook, twitter and so on which are the first way
Really excited about getting the load time information, Google Analytics has made continuous upgrades that move them one step closer to an enterprise solution. Thanks for sharing.
Realy excited by this! I'm eagerly anticipating watching the effect on page speed on conversions. We have a ton of anecdotal evidence, but now SEOs and developers will be able to make arguments for better web infrastructures based on the bottom line. Well done.
Wow! Big news! Thanks for this Tom (missed it on Twitter)
The biggest sign yet that site speed will be more important as a ranking signal. Think about how much data they can collect about organic listings, bounce rate and site speed... once they figure out the correlation they it will definitely be more important in the algorithm.
Looks the job of optimisation is now a full agency problem rather than just a marketing one!
I missed this on Twitter too, just installed the code and waiting for my juicy data to come rolling in...
What's the chance Google will be using the analytics site speed data itself in the algo ? I'm hoping my site comes back ok but if it turns out to be a bit slower than I expected I don't want to be arming google with info that could hurt my rankings
I can't guarantee that it's not going to but Google has made many claims that Analytics data is in no way tied in to ranking data.
This is going to be a very useful tool for site owners. Not only do you need to know how fast/slow your site is loading, you need to know how that is affecting your visitors. Are they willing to stick around a couple extra seconds and wait for the page to load?
I've recently started to work on improving website speed so this was exciting and timely news...until I saw we needed more code. Considering I'm trying to reduce the number of requests I'm not sure whether it's worth it. Is there any evidence of how much it could slow the page load down? Even if it's only for a small sample I'm wary.
This is great and will give me tools to counter argue lazy designers and programmers resistance every time I mention page speed improvements (Losslessly compressing, CSS sprites, code minifying and so on). Also believe this is yet another sign that page load time is becoming an important factor.
Hi, the graphic and visits data in Google Analytics doesn't refresh when I put a filter by keyword. Can you see?
Img, Unfiltered https://www.mecagoenlos.com/Fotos/abug-analytics2.gif
Img, filtered https://www.mecagoenlos.com/Fotos/abug-analytics.gif
¿This is a bug?
sorry the off topic :s
This is great news! It is great to see Google once again offer a new feature that brings attention to the complex problem of improving website performance. From modpagespeed to Page Speed and now Site Performance statistics in Google Analytics, Google is making it easier for Web developers to discover how important Web page speed is and how to begin to tackle this problem.
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