Hi, Sorry if this isnt in the right forum, I wasnt quite sure where to put it.
So in my sudden baptism into the world of optimisation I have now learned that measuring html d/l time, DOM loaded, or page loaded bear no relationship to what the user experiences in the web page.
The only thing that now feels important to me is the time from a filmstrip when the user can read posts in our forum.
Is there a way/tool for tracking this over time? We are really suffering at the moment because we have no way to look back at how this changes over time. I appreciate we can do periodic runs on WPT, but it would be great to see a graph tracking a few times a day (at least) how this metric moves over time.
Can anyone suggest how to do this? or am I getting my thinking wrong?
Just add an inline script tag in the page in the template where the first post is logged that records the time when it is executed. It won’t be perfect but that should be really close to what you are looking for and you’d be able to grab it from your users in the field.
As part of speed optimisation work, we moved our Google Analytics code to the bottom of the page. I guess to have Site Speed tracking at key points in the page we’d have to move the GA code back up, which feels a but counter-intuitive to me… Or is the feeling that GA code is pretty optimised, and any overhead would be worth the insight gained?
The Google analytics async code pushes commands onto a stack so as long as you have the
var _gaq = _gaq || [];
up at the top of the page you should be able to insert any timings you’d like without having to move the code. That said, assuming you are using the async snippet (and if you aren’t, go change that NOW) - Introduction to ga.js (Legacy) | Analytics for Web (ga.js) | Google Developers there should be no benefit to loading it at the end of the document. You would actually get some benefit by moving it up higher.
