[UA] About Site Speed [Legacy]

The Site Speed reports show how quickly users are able to see and interact with content. You can identify areas that need improvement, and then track the extent of those improvements.

The Site Speed reports measure three aspects of latency:

• Page-load time for a sample of pageviews on your site. You can view the data across different dimensions to see how quickly your pages loaded from a variety of perspectives (e.g., in different browsers, in different countries). Data is available in the Page Timings report.
• Execution speed or load time of any discrete hit, event, or user interaction that you want to track (e.g., how quickly images load, response time to button clicks). Data is available in the User Timings report.
• How quickly the browser parses the document and makes it available for user interaction. No additional configuration is required to see this data. Data is available in the Page Timings report, on the DOM Timings subtabs.

See Site Speed data

No changes to the tracking code are necessary to see data in the Page Timings and Speed Suggestions reports. The User Timings report requires additional setup. Follow the Developer Guide instructions.

To see the Site Speed reports:

1. Sign in to Google Analytics.
2. Navigate to your view.
3. Open Reports.
4. Select Behavior > Site Speed.

Page Timings report

The Page Timings report lets you perform detailed analysis of individual page performance. The report includes the following tabs and subtabs:

• Explorer: Page data in the context of different primary and secondary dimensions
  • Site Usage: Basic interaction metrics like pageviews and bounce rate
  • Technical: Network and server metrics
  • DOM Timings: Document-parsing metrics
• Distribution: Timing buckets for different metrics
• Map Overlay: Geographic data in the context of different primary and secondary dimensions
  • Site Usage: Basic interaction metrics like pageviews and bounce rate
  • Technical: Network and server metrics
  • DOM Timings: Document-parsing metrics

Speed Suggestions report

The Speed Suggestions report lets you see the speed of your website across metrics like Avg. Page Download Time (sec) and Avg. Server Response Time (sec). The report enables you to identify areas for improvement across your site and on specific pages so you can make your pages load faster.

The PageSpeed Tools also help you analyze and optimize your website and it includes techniques for implementing the suggestions.

User Timings report

The User Timings report lets you perform detailed analysis of individual resource performance (e.g., images, videos, buttons). The report includes the following tabs:

• Explorer: Resource data in the context of different primary and secondary dimensions
• Distribution: Timing buckets for different metrics
• Map Overlay: Geographic data in the context of different primary and secondary dimensions

Notes

• Site speed tracking has no impact on bounce rate for your site.
• Site speed can only be tracked from browsers that support the HTML5 Navigation Timing interface or have the Google Toolbar installed. Typically this includes: Chrome, Firefox 7 and above, Internet Explorer 9 and above, Android 4.0 browser and above, as well as earlier versions of Internet Explorer with the Google Toolbar installed.
• The calculation for Average Page Load Time changed in November 2011: Average Page Load Time now includes redirection time. You may see an increase in your site's overall page load time, depending on the number and significance of redirects on your site. When you make date comparisons, please remember that data collected before November 2011 doesn't include redirection times.
• Starting around Nov 16, 2011, many sites saw increased Avg. Page Load Times. These inflated metrics are not a real speed issue for the sites, but a result of bugs in Firefox’s Navigation Timing implementation, specifically, how the start of navigation is calculated. As a result, pages viewed in Firefox show higher values for Avg. Redirection Time, and thus Avg. Page Load Time. This was fixed as part of Firefox 9, released on December 10, 2011 and auto-updated to users over the following 3-4 weeks. If your site has higher page-load times during this period, you can determine if this is due to Firefox by checking the data along the Browser dimension.
• By default, a fixed 1% sampling of your users make up the data pool from which the page timing metrics are derived. See the analytics.js developer documentation for details on customizing the Site Speed sample rate.
• Previous versions of Site Speed required a tracking-code change to add _trackPageLoadTime. Sites with the deprecated call still collect speed data at the 10% sampling rate. However, this call will be ignored in the future, and the sample rate will change to the default 1%. Consider updating your tracking code to use setSiteSpeedSampleRate() to set a higher sampling rate.

Related Resources

User Timings developer documentation:

• analytics.js
• gtag.js