14 DAY TRIAL // Google has always been obsessed with speed, for good reason, and has tried to spread its gospel and get web developers to optimize and speed up their sites. The latest such foray is the addition of a performance measuring tool to Google Analytics.
It's a very interesting approach, Analytics is already used by millions of websites to monitor site traffic. What's more, the people using Analytics are exactly the ones that are going to be most interested in optimizing their websites.
"A faster web is better for both users and businesses. A slow loading landing page not only impacts your conversion rate, but can also impact AdWords Landing Page Quality and ranking in Google search," Google wrote.
"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," it said.
"Therefore, we are thrilled to announce the availability of the Site Speed report in the new Google Analytics platform. With the Site Speed report you can measure the page load time across your site," it explained.
The new feature is not enabled by default but is available to anyone using the latest version of Google Analytics. Webmasters need to modify the Analytics code embedded on their sites, Google details the changes needed here.
Once enabled, Site Speed will enable to track several performance related metrics. You can find out what pages load the slowest in which browsers, or see what regions have the slowest connections, affecting how fast your website loads.
Google has been ramping up efforts to provide better performance measuring tools, Page Speed is now available for Firefox, Chrome as well as from a dedicated website.
The company is directly interested in faster websites, which should mean more advertising revenue for it, but it's the websites themselves that have the most to gain.