Monitoring Site Speed and User Experience with Google Analytics

Google Analytics provides tools to monitor site speed and user experience by measuring how quickly users can see and interact with your website content. In Universal Analytics (UA), you can access detailed Site Speed reports under Behavior > Site Speed, including:

• Page Timings report: Analyzes individual page performance with tabs for site usage, technical metrics (like server response time), and DOM timings (document parsing).
• Speed Suggestions report: Offers insights on average page download and server response times, with recommendations for improvements using PageSpeed Tools.

To track site speed effectively in UA, you may need to adjust your tracking code to set the siteSpeedSampleRate to ensure sufficient data collection from supported browsers.

In Google Analytics 4 (GA4), there are no built-in site speed reports like UA, but you can track page load time and Core Web Vitals (such as Largest Contentful Paint, First Input Delay, and Cumulative Layout Shift) by setting up custom tracking via Google Tag Manager (GTM) and custom JavaScript. This involves:

1. Creating custom JavaScript variables in GTM to capture page load timing.
2. Sending these timings as custom events to GA4.
3. Registering custom metrics in GA4 (e.g., loading_time_sec) to measure page load time.
4. Creating calculated metrics to report average page load times per page.

Segmenting site speed data by dimensions such as country and device type is recommended to understand performance variations and optimize user experience accordingly.

In summary, Google Analytics enables monitoring of site speed and user experience through built-in reports in Universal Analytics and customizable tracking in GA4, helping identify performance bottlenecks and improve website responsiveness.