How To Configure Google Analytics To Track Page Load Times Of Your Blog

Google gives lots of importance to websites/blogs that load faster and quickly serves the pages. For every webmaster it’s important to keep track page load times of their websites and blogs.

Google recently introduced a new feature in Google Analytics to track page speed and get detailed information on performance of the sites. However the Google Analytics script already installed on your websites/blogs does not enable this feature automatically. You should add the following line of code to your existing Analytics code to trace page load times

_gaq.push([‘_trackPageLoadTime’]);

After adding the above line of code your Analytics script should look like this

<script type="text/javascript">
 var _gaq = _gaq || [];
 _gaq.push(['_setAccount', '<your analytics id>']);
 _gaq.push(['_trackPageview']);
 _gaq.push(['_trackPageLoadTime']);
 (function() {
   var ga = document.createElement('script'); 

ga.type = 'text/javascript'; ga.async = true;
   ga.src = ('https:' == document.location.protocol ? 

'https://ssl' : 'http://www') + '.google-analytics.com/ga.js';
   var s = document.getElementsByTagName('script')[0]; 

s.parentNode.insertBefore(ga, s);
 })();
</script>

If you are using the WordPress plugin Google Analytics for WordPress, upgrade it to the latest version and it automatically adds the code required for tracking page loads.

Once you apply the changes to your blog/website, switch to the new version of Google Analytics and navigate to Content ->Site Speed tab to view detailed page load speed information.