Track Page Load Time with Site Speed Google Analytics Report

Few months back Google has announced the availability of Site Speed report in the new Google Analytics platform. This feature is really useful in analysing the page load time across your site.
As we all know slow loading websites and pages irritates not only online users but also the search engine bots. Slow loading websites may get penalized by search engines. It is very important to make a website faster and efficient.
In the Website optimization category we have discussed many topics on how to make website faster. Some of these topics may be interesting to you.
You may also like to Read:

• Top Tips to Speed Up website – Website and Blog Optimization
• File Caching to Speed Up Website and Web Page Load Time
• How to Test your Website Speed Against Benchmarks?
• Speed up website -Compress CSS/JavaScript using GZIP/DEFLATE compression – Optimization Tips -Part 2

Google Analytics is a premium free web analytics service from Google. It provides very useful information about your websites online performance. Google Analytics add nice features from time to time and became a high quality web analytics tool that really helps the webmasters to analyse , identify and rectify most critical areas where your website needs improvement. Reports like Visitor reports, Traffics Sources, Content. conversion and even Advertising reports makes the service a top quality analytics tool.
You may also like to Read:

• Average Bounce Rate, Good Bounce Rate and Acceptable Bounce Rate

How To Track Page Load Time with Google Analytics

As we mentioned, Google has added an extremely useful feature to Google Analytics. Google Analytics now allows webmasters to measure Page Load Time with Site Speed Analytics Report. This reports helps you to measure the page load time across your site.
This new Site Speed reports helps the webmasters in a number of ways.

• Using this report you can identify the landing pages that are slower. Once identified you can take measures to rectify the problem and make those pages load faster. If your critical page is loading slow you need to rectify the issue by identifying the root cause.

• You can also identify which campaigns correspond to faster page loads overall. Identifying the traffics sources will help you to adjust your campaigns to make to yield optimum results.

• The Site Speed Reports also helps you to analyse the site load time across geographies. This will help you to take measures to improve site speed specific to geographies. For example geographic regions or ISPs are showing a high latency, you can deliver alternate pages more suitable to lower bandwidth reception.

• Another important factor that you can identify that affect the site load sped is the influence of technology especially Browser technology. If you can identify the reason behind slow speed when a specific Browser or Browser version is used, you can easily fix it and make the website optimized across browsers.

How to Set up Site Speed Report in Google Analytics?

It is easy to set-up site speed report in Google Analytics. By default the site speed report or page speed measurement is turned off in Google Analytics. You need to enable them by adding an additional method in your Analytics tracking code. To do this you should have your site’s admin access to edit your pages or template page.
You need to add the following line of code which is an additional method in your Google Analytics Tracking code.

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_trackPageLoadTime();

Your complete Google Analytics tracking code should be some thing similar to the below code,

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<script type="text/javascript">
 
  var _gaq = _gaq || [];
  _gaq.push(['_setAccount', 'YOUR_GA_CODE']);
  _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>

If you have set up Site Speed tracking correctly , you can verify it by checking the analytics reports data. If everything is OK, then you will see report data in a few hours after publishing your changes. To test this open the Site Speed report and set the date range selector to the current day. See below.
If the setup is correct you see data appearing in the reports

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