Quick pages matter
I’ve been saying for 2 years to any ProStores merchant in earshot that your page loading speed is important, its important to your customers, and its important to their search engine rankings.
Last year Google officially announced that they would be giving a bump to the rankings for sites that loaded quickly (second paragraph) and they added a chart to the Webmaster Tools interface.
To be honest barely a handful of merchants listened to me.
Well, now Google has made a bigger deal of it. They’ve added page loading speed as a factor in their Google Analytics platform. I’m willing to bet that its now even more of a factor than before.
More reasons this is important:
- Track load speed by page type easily
- Measure the impact of page loading speed on conversion %
- Calculate load speed for pages behind a login page
- Segment load speed by type of user (i.e. custom variables) such as registered and non-registered users
- Analyze load speed by geographic region, browser, etc
By default, page speed measurement is turned off, so you’ll only see 0’s in the Site Speed report until you’ve enabled it. To start measuring site speed, you need to make a small change to your Analytics tracking code. If you are using the most updated version of the Asynchronous Tracking code add the last line of the code below _gaq.push([‘_trackPageLoadTime’]); to your tracking code.
hi there,
do you need to add this code to the order confirmation page as well or should i only add this for the footer?
thanks,
mike
You can add _gaq.push([‘_trackPageLoadTime’]); to the google analytics code wherever you have it installed, so if you have GA ecommerce tracking code installed in your order confirm template you can add this bit of code to it there too. just keep it between _gaq.push([‘_trackPageview’]); and _gaq.push([‘_addTrans’, definitely do not put it after _gaq.push([‘_addTrans’, otherwise it will stop tracking sales. If you run into issues we can help with the install, the cost to upgrade your tracking code is just $20.