One of the things any webmaster should be aware of is the site’s loading speed. Google already incorporated site speed as a ranking factor on April 2010 and even though it doesn’t holds such a great rankings role like content quality, in some cases it can affect the site’s rankings significantly.
In order to offer site owners better view on their site’s speed state, Google Analytics launched a few days an updated version of the Site Speed report. You can find it on your Analytics account under the Standard Reporting tab, on the left sidebar’s Content section.
Unlike the old site speed one report, now the new one contains two sets of reports- Overview and Page Timing.
Site Speed Overview
The overview reports provides a general glimpse on the site’s speed performances. Here, The user can choose to break down the loading time for six average time factors on a graph:
- Page Load (the default)
- Redirection
- Domain Lookup
- Server Connection
- Server Response
- Page Download
Below that, the user can break down the site’s speed by browser, Country/Territory or by individual pages.
Page Timing
The second report called Page Timing and it consolidated most of the old site speed reporting. This report provides a detailed and deeper coverage of the site’s speed aspects. It divided into the following three tabs:
- Explorer- Allows to break down the loading time of pages by varied dimensions.
- Performance- Shows how the six average time factors are breaking down by speed ranges.
- Map Overlay- Shows the site’s speed performances across different geographic locations.
No actions needed to allow the site speed tracking as it already included by default on the existing code (it samples 1% of the site’s visits). However, site owners can tune the sampling rate for up to 10K visits a day by customizing the tracking code (find out how to do that here).
Google are stating that the Intelligence Reports will now also include the site speed metrics and the user can create custom alerts for site’s speed metrics. I suggest you to also go over the other recent improvement Analytics made lately regarding to social reports.
For more information about site speed and how Google measuring it, you can watch the following video: