Have you ever clicked a link and waited around for more than 5 seconds for the page to load? Or have you ever closed a page that takes far to long to load? Your site speed is important because the faster your page loading times, the more readers you will get to your site.
Tracking page loading times and site speed using Google Analytics is an easy way to discover your slow loading pages/posts and fix them. This is not an entirely new feature however its now become standard so you don’t have to edit your tracking code like you had to do prior to 18 November 2011.
You can setup Google Analytics here if you haven’t already.
To find your site speed reports in Google Analytics simply navigate to the Standard Reporting tab > Content > Site Speed in the left hand sidebar of your account.
Google Analytics currently offers 3 site speed reports:
- Explorer
- Performance
- Map Overlay
Site Speed Explorer Report
The Explorer report provides a list of your slow loading pages including the Average Page Load Time and URL of the page which makes it very easy to find and fix.
Site Speed Performance Report
The Performance report provides the average page load times so you can dig deeper and find what percentage of your visitors are experiencing different page loading times for the same content.
Site Speed Map Overlay
The Map Overplay report displays the site speed which your visitors experience by Geographic location. This would also explain why the Performance report looks so bad.
The darker the country, the slower page load speeds they are experiencing which effects the overall reports.
The site speed reports provided by the new Google Analytics give you an easy way to monitor and fix slow loading pages on your WordPress site.
Leave a Reply
You must be logged in to post a comment.