Measuring Website Performance With Google Analytics Site Speed Reports

Page load times can have a dramatic effect on the performance of your site. Very long page load times can be detrimental to your site’s conversion rate. To help webmasters improve site speeds, Google Analytics recently released the Site Speed Analytics report.

The Site Speed report allows you to diagnose potential page speed problems at an early stage. It can address questions such as,

Which are the slowest landing pages
Which traffic sources generate faster page load speeds overall.
How does page loading time vary geographically
Do different browsers effect loading times

For example, if you find that page load times are significantly higher when your site is viewed in a particular browser then this could alert you to possible problems with site coding. Alternatively, if the slowest landing pages on your site are ones that you are particularly keen to promote, then you can take appropriate action to rectify the situation sooner rather than later.

In addition to getting information about average page load times, the Google Analytics Site Speed report now has a performance tab that allows you to drill down further. So, for a given average page load speed, you can press the performance tab to see a breakdown of speeds (in terms of percentage visits) that were either higher, lower or at the average load time. As an added refinement, you can then use advance segments to isolate and further understand the specifics of what might be causing your pages to load slowly.

To set up the Site Speed report in Google Analytics you need to change your existing analytics code by adding the following method:

_trackPageLoadTime();

Full setup details can be found at the Google Analytics site.