: Average page load time reported by Google Analytics is much slower than I observe when I visit my site Google Analytics reports our site to have an average page load time of about 4.5-6 seconds.

@Berumen354

Are your biggest percentage of visitors based in the same location as you and your server ? If you have a Sweden based or European server and the majority of your visitors are US based. DNS could be your problem, you have to remember there is two very different aspects of page speed.

Perceived page speeds which are user experience motivated, and physical page speed which is actual server response to the location of which its being called.

You can use speed test tools such as webpagetest.org/ and select the testing location to compare different response times around the world. Another good resource is performance.sucuri.net/

Vote Up Vote Down

@Ogunnowo487

You can use Real-user Monitoring service. It's the best way for monitoring page load time.

You have:
- Google Analytics
- Cedexis Radar
- Gomez
- Keynote
- Pingdom

and many others...

Vote Up Vote Down

@Yeniel560

I think you may be confused about a few things. First, GA measures exactly the same things for you as well as your visitors (unless the user is receiving different content). Any third party scripts loaded on a page are loaded for your users and you just the same. So there cannot be a discrepancy there.

The load times shown in GA are only for web pages. If you load an image or script direct in the browser GA has no way of knowing (because the script is in your web pages).

Any discrepancies you are seeing will be down to one of these factors:


You have a faster connection speed than most of your users.
You have a better computer than most of your users.
You are closer to your server than most of your users.
A handful of users are on really slow connections or a page load had a blocking script that wasn't loading and had to wait until it timed out.


The last one in particular is quite common in my experience. If you look at individual page load times you will see some that have massive outliers. There isn't really anything you can do about that.

Vote Up Vote Down

@Goswami781

For a general feel on how fast the site is loading from different locations try this service: tools.pingdom.com/fpt/ It is pretty good.

Vote Up Vote Down

@Correia994

you are absolutely right for being concerned about users experience when they browse to your website. But I think when you see that it's about around one second it's because you are a returning visitor and some of your website's files are in your browser cache, and when google measure load time, they refer to a new visitor.

Vote Up Vote Down