Site speed is becoming more important to track and improve on since the search engines are using site speed in the ranking algorithm. A few readers have requested us to write a simple tutorial on how they can track their site speed easily. Here is a quick tutorial showing how you can use your Google Analytics account to track the speed of your WordPress site.
Click on the following link to open the PDF file:
I hope this helps you easily track the site speed of your WordPress powered site. Once you have this setup you will need to optimize your site to make it faster. The article on how to speed up your WordPress site should help with that.
I admit that Google Analytics is a great and helpful tool but it really is not easy for me to understand how it works. Until now I am still seeking for some ways to use this tool properly and effectively.
Thanks for the info – I haven’t been actively using the Google Analytics for WordPress plugin and will look into using that now. I’m fairly new to SEO and website development, but have been using Google Analytics and it is so useful – it’s helping me to understand trends of the readers and how to improve the less popular parts of the site. When I first started, I read an article on how to use Google Analytics and how it can benefit – could be useful to others too http://www.lucidica.com/blog/online-marketing/top-5-tips-for-a-small-business-using-google-analytics/
Here is a quick (lazy) way to track all Ajax events on a WordPress site. Simply add this to the header of your article.php file:
$(document).ready(function() {
$(document).ajaxSend(function(event, xhr, settings){
if (typeof _gaq !== “undefined” && _gaq !== null) {
_gaq.push([‘_trackPageview’, settings.url]);
}
});
});
There are few good open source tracking tool available but I also do like Google Analytics, easy to use and track every single activities on the website.
Each and every aspect given above is important but which i feel is No matter what you choose, you absolutely need web analytic for your website or else you’re blind to all the forces that make your website as popular (or unpopular) as it is. Checking out your web analytic is like going to the doctor for a routine check-up. You need to know what’s going on. Only this will help you to know whats going on and will take you closer to your results.
Yeah, i heard about speed affect the rank of a website too. I’m using GA everyday but never knew about this before. Thank for sharing.
Site speed is important for the user-experience, but it does only affect search engine rankings in some specific cases.
This is from Google’s official blog earlier this year -“While site speed is a new signal, it doesn’t carry as much weight as the relevance of a page. Currently, less than 1% of search queries are affected by the site speed signal”
In other words if your site takes longer than 15-20 seconds to load, it will affect your ranking.
I don’t know exactly how updated this information is and it might happen that you are correct.
I did not know that you could check site speed in Analytics, thanks for bringing it to me:)
The best thing I like about tracking page view with google analytics is that you can use this report to measure where latency for your pages seems most critical. For example, you might learn that the target audience of your site is located in a geographic region where the Internet connection speed is generally slower than is optimal for some of your pages.
Google analytics, has always been a great tool for website owns. I use analytics for all my sites and love it. You can get so much information from the analytics.