Today I read a great presentation from Joshua Bixby (Strangeloop). He showed a nice way to create a business case for Web Performance Optimization (#wpo). The case is that a slower user experience leads to less revenue, but it's not easy to prove that. What you could do is set up an A/B test with a slower page as B variant. The upside is that you can make a business case, the downside is that you will lose revenue. Joshua came up with another option: we already have the connection speed and browser version in Google Analytics!

The older browsers and slower connection types have a negative impact on page load times. So they should show us numbers for people with a slower user experience.

Read more: And that is why you need to speed up your site! »

A small blogpost about a new version of the ga.js file that was launched a week ago. As you can see they changed the way customvars are being reported:

"Fixed a bug in Custom Variables that caused some values to be encoded in reports."

Spaces (and other characters) were reported as "%20". So if my name was in a customvar it would look like this:
Read more: Google Analytics cleaned up Customvars but broke reports »

Adobe is rolling out a new version of their Flash player (10.3) that makes it easy to remove and block your Flash cookies. In the old days (yesterday before my update) we had this menu (right-click on a Flash object):

But as of the new update we have an extra option. If you right-click on a Flash object you see this new option called "Global Settings" that brings you to this menu:

Read more: Adobe makes it easy to remove and block Flash cookies »

In the rebound an article about the tracking of your site's performance with Google Analytics. Almost a year ago I wrote this article in Dutch, but there are some improvements that made life easier. Google Analytics released the 'set events as goals' functionality that is really helpful here.

The script I'm going to explain will track page load time and page render time per individual URL. I know some other articles that describe a comparing technique but I really think the way I use it gives you more insights (at least for smaller sites).

Sitespeed tracking is important

I don't have to tell you how important it is to know how visitors experience your site. Sluggish sites will cost you money in the end. Site speed is a minor SEO ranking factor and fast sites tend to have more pageviews per visit and a higher conversion rate.

Read more: Track site speed / load time with Google Analytics events »

A very hot topic last year: site speed, web performance, site performance or whatever you want to call it (got better suggestions?). But how do you measure the speed of you own site? There are several tool that can measure the load times of your site, but which one is right?

First of all: what is Site Speed

The speed of a site is the time it takes from the moment a user navigates to your site (for example through a link) until the site is fully loaded and usable. But there are many factors in this period that helps keeping the visitor patient enough to wait for a full load. The first moment is the moment when the browser begins rendering a site: until that moment people have to look at a white screen where nothing happens. Then the site starts to appear on the screen bit by bit until he is usable. And the last stage is where all the images are loaded to make the site look complete.

Read more: How to measure Site Speed or Web Performance »