Google has confirmed that page load speed is one of the 200+ variables that contribute to the Search Engine Results Page (SERP). While there are a number of sites that will tell you how fast your site loads to your location, it would be nice to see how long it takes your site to reach your customers. In addition, once your site gets past a few pages, tracking the load speed of each page become a REAL PAIN.

Google Analytics Site Speed metric has changed that.

Using Sync

If you have not upgraded to the Google Analytics Async code you may want to do so now. As the name suggests the code is asynchronous, which means your page will still load even if the Google code is now available. Plus the code is easier to use and offers many features now available in the older code.

Getting Started

Again, if you haven’t already done so, update your Google Analytics setting to us the new reporting system. It is much easier to use and has many new features.

Adding the code for tracking the page speed is as simple as adding one line of JavaScript to the async code.

_gaq.push(['_trackPageLoadTime']);

See Google Answers for more information.

Results After One Day

Results are available after one day. It is important to be aware, as Google points out, the page speed is not run on every page load. It is also important to remember that the dashboard, shown below, shows the average speed. You need to drill down to see how each page loads.

Update

Information from other sources indicated the present sample rate is too low to be useful on sites for site with low traffic volumes.

I have only tested one site with a traffic volume of about 100 page views a day, so far, . There was an initial test on the top landing pages and a few interior pages, then nothing for the last two days.

Current ‘guesstimates’ of the sample rate is 2% of page views are sampled. If that is true, sites with a large number of pages, but low volume, may take some time to get completely crawled. And, as pointed out before, the ‘Avg Page Load Time’ is a fairly useless measurement. Drill down to get load times for specific pages

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