Brian Clifton provide great idea and a script to track page load time using google analytics event tracking. Immediately we started using it and realized that its invaluable from actionable analytics perspective. We worked with a client for implementing this quickly. Basically, here is how event tracker works.
trackEvent(category, action, optional_label, optional_value)
We started passing data of the time taken to load the page in the “optional_value” parameter measuring from the start of the page load to the time when load is finished. We also passed this data get maximum granularity of milliseconds.
So here is what we have got. You see that #1 item takes about 900% more time to load. So, this is insight. Actionable as well. See how it becomes actionable.
As of now we have figured that there is one page on the website which takes huge amount of time to load. ok great. Now we used charles proxy to understand what kind of time taken for different server requests on this page. Below is the output that we got from the Charles.(have eliminated 1 to 12 as they weren’t significant).
If you notice #34,#40 takes both about 16 and 9 seconds relatively. That’s huge for any given page. Although these where async requests so that didn’t deter users from clicking on any other link , however this is huge.
Unfortunately, I am not in position to comment on what we did after-wards, its obvious that we could reach to the root of the problem very quickly. We realized and found one call to the server which has creating a problem, we modified that and we are all set to go.
Another piece of extreme learning that we had gotten is that suddenly few pages started taking about 10 times more time to load than last month’s average. We tried and investigated then we realize that it was due to the link /internet cable got broken in the middle of the sea somewhere which passes the bytes. It was terrifying to see it however news got us relaxed a bit.
Sounds easier said than done? What do you think ?
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