Is Google’s Site Speed Analytics Accurate?

Google Analytics has made big gains recently adding both site speed and real time stats, but is Google’s site speed stats accurate?

In this review, we”ll take a look at todays analytics for site speed and use 2 other site speed tools to test the page loading times of what Google has listed as being the slowest on this site.

Before these additions, Google Analytics seemed slow to update data and offered far less real time data than they do today.

Recently i deactivated and deleted many non essential plugins in order to reduce the use of server resources and improve page loading speeds.

I’ve been using Google Analytics Site Speed data to see how fast my web pages load and here’s the result.

To access Google Analytics Site Speed Reports you’ll need to setup a Google Analytics account if you haven’t already done so.

Site speed is located under Standard Reporting > Content > Site Speed in the new Google Analytics.

Here’s a screenshot of my top 10 slowest page loading URL’s for WPSites.net. You can easily check your own URL’s using Pingdom to test the accuracy yourself.

Average Page Loading Times

I highlighted these URL’s and searched for them in Google SERPS, then clicked them all to check out the real page loading times.

I also used both Pingdom and YSlow to test page loading times and here’s the real results in the video below. On average, all pages loaded in less than 5 seconds which is wildly different to what Googles Site Speed data produces.

Googles Site Speed Versus Pingdom

Increasing Site Speed & Improving Page Loading Times

You’ll also find SEOMoz has written several posts about Tracking Page Load Speeds Using Google Analytics & Tips on Optimizing Page Speeds.

If you haven’t yet checked out Googles site speed reports, you may find this post on how to fix slow page loading times and increase site speed useful.

I hope Google isn’t using site speed reports when assessing index rankings in SERPS!