Google has announced the inclusion of a new feature – the Site Speed Report, in the latest Google Analytics. This feature will allow you to measure the page load time on pages of your website. According to the company, Google Analytics users can now understand how load times impact their ranking at Google, user experience and eventually the conversion rates.

Google says, “To improve the performance of your pages, you first need to measure and diagnose the speed of a page, which can be a difficult task. Furthermore, even with page speed measurements, it’s critical to look at page speed in context of other web analytics data.”

The company cites four different functions Google Analytics users can perform using the Site Speed Report. Users can apply the Site Speed Report to:

• Content: To find out which landing pages are slowest?
• Traffic sources: Measure which campaigns correspond to faster page loads overall?
• Visitor: How does page load time differ, with visitor to visitor or from place to place?
• Technology: Does the site load time differ from browser to browser or one OS to another?

Once the cause of the issue is diagnosed, users can take perform the necessary improvements or changes to speed up the loading of those pages that has been taking more time to load.
 
How to set up and use the Site Speed Report?

The Site Speed Report feature comes turned-off by default, denoting only 0s in the report. To start using the feature and measure your website’s load speed, you need to turn it on and make a little change to the Analytics tracking code. The required tracking code changes are explained on the Site Speed page at the Analytics Help Center. When this tracking code change is made, the Site Speed Report feature will automatically use a small sample of pageviews to measure the page load time. If the site speed set up procedure is done correctly, users will be able to see report data in a few hours.

It seems that the Google Analytics team and the Make the Web Faster team are working really hard to speed the web up and provide a better search experience.

Originally published on PageTraffic Buzz