A new tool to check the speed of your website has been added to Google Analytics. Now available in beta it simply requires users to make a small change to their tracking code.

The rolling release of the new version of Google Analytics continues with Site Speed report.

This tool is currently available in beta to all Analytics users, and can be used to measure the speed your pages load and diagnose where possible problems lie.

It’s obvious that a page that loads slowly may put off potential visitors, and it can also cause problems for AdWords Landing Page Quality and ranking in Google search.

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As well as letting you measure the page load time across your site, you can also show which pages are loading most slowly, whether visitors from different geographical regions are experiencing different loading speeds, and whether your site loads faster or slower for different browsers.

Once you’ve identified pages that load slowly, you can use Site Speed report to view the effects of any optimization you carry out to see what it does to the load time.

Using the new tool is a matter of making a small change to your Google Analytics tracking code, and there’s an article on exactly how to do this in the Analytics Help Center.

One potential problem with the statistics produced by the report is that Google has set the tool up to only check a sampling of pageviews to your site. This has been done because enabling Site Speed tracking for a site results in an extra request made to the Google Analytics servers, separate from the page tracking GIF request made for pageviews, so only a sample of views are analyzed to minimize the impact on overall site latency.

You can read more about the Site Speed report on the Google Analytics blog: Measure Page Load Time with Site Speed Analytics Report. 

Related news:

New Google Analytics API

Google Analytics adds new view

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