Improve your website’s performance with the new Speed Suggestions report
November 5th, 2013 | Published in Google Analytics
Users prefer fast sites. And businesses benefit from it: faster sites tend to have lower bounce rates, increased customer satisfaction and better engagement. Site owners agree, and it shows in their actions taken to optimize site speed: we’re pleased to see from our own benchmarks over the last two years the web is getting faster (not only desktop, even mobile access is around 30% faster compared to last year).
Making your own site faster is something you can act on today and one of the best ways to improve user experience. To help, we’re excited to launch the new Speed Suggestions report in our suite of website performance reports. Not only can you measure and visualize the performance of your website, but you can now also speed up the slowest pages with concrete and actionable suggestions.
Speed Suggestions report
The new Speed Suggestions report shows the average page load time for top visited pages on your website and integrates with the PageSpeed Insights tool to surface suggestions for improving the pages for speed. The PageSpeed Insights tool analyzes the contents of a web page and generates a speed score and concrete suggestions. The speed score indicates the amount of potential improvement on the page. The closer the score is to 100, the more optimized the page is for speed.
In the report, you can click through a suggestions link to see a page with all of the suggestions sorted by their impact on site speed. Example suggestions include reducing the amount of content that needs to load before your users can interact with the page, minifying JavaScript, and reducing redirects. Note that if you rewrite your urls before displaying the url in Analytics, or your pages requires a login (see the help article for more details), then the PageSpeed Insights tool may not be able to analyze the page and generate a score and suggestions.
If you would like to dig into the which of your pages take the most time for your users to load, check out the existing Page Timings report which breaks down the average page load time for each page. Once you’ve identified your slowest pages, you can use the new Speed Suggestions report to improve them. For more general suggestions on how to improve your website, check out these performance articles, and read more about the new report in the detailed help center article. As always, we welcome feedback on ways to improve the report for our users.
For more help, visit our Google Developers site with tools tips and ideas on making the web faster.
Posted by Chen Xiao, Google Analytics Team