Google Analytics is no doubt the most popular visitor tracking tool. It’s widely used by massive amount of websites and blogs. But you might be surprised that you may be experiencing severely slow page loading time at least in Europe, according to the recent research by Royal Pingdom.
Test Environment
The study was conducted using both ga.js and urchin.js tracking script. The data were collected once a minute over a 3 months period. North American load times were tested from 5 different locations. European load times were tested from 4 different locations. All test were done with the Pingdom uptime monitoring service.
Test Result
During the 3 months test period, there has been extremely little downtime, just a few minutes which can be ignored. This is a good sign as Google has been massively invested in infrastructure. But when it comes to script loading time, the result is very interesting.
Generally Google Analytics loads faster in Europe than in North America. If you compare Europe and North America, you will find that Google Analytics loaded almost twice as slowly as it did on average in Europe during all hours of use. But in North America, the different is not so much. To be precise,
The difference between the maximum and minimum load times for North America is 27%, but in Europe the difference is 97%.
The performance of Google Analytics is much more uneven over a day period in Europe but it is much more stable in North America. Personally I think North America performs better than Europe although Europe is slight faster.
I feel a bit disappointed as the research doesn’t include Asia, South America, Africa, and Australia. It will give us a complete picture if Royal Pingdom can include all of them in future research.
Conclusion
From the result of the research, I believe Google should continue to scale up the system and infrastructure as the website traffic is continuously growing rapidly.
Do you think that the performance of Google Analytics is acceptable? Does it slowing down your blog? Please kindly share with us the result in your country. If you think Google Analytics is really slow, then what is the alternative recommended?
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Bingo, when i used GA, long time back, i noticed the same, and removed it, use sitemeter now. I will activate GA again due to the high amount of data it gives me like tracking adsense and the likes.