Is Google Analytics Hurting Your Website Speed?

Here's a google analytics load time hack I do for all my clients.

If you already set up the analytics:

• Open the property to view the analytics like normal, then at the bottom left click on the grey cog for settings and open your admin settings
• Then under "Data collection and modification" click on "Data Streams"
• Click on the stream for your client
• Under "enhanced measurement" you see the little pill tags for everything you're measuring. To the right is a grey cog for settings. Click on your stream settings. A sidebar will pop up. These are all the streams you are collecting data from. You don't actually need them all.
• Toggle off the outbound clicks, site search, video engagement, and file downloads. You don't need to collect that data since you don't have that data. Then hit save.

Google analytics will now not take as much resources to load because it's loading 60% less scripts to monitor things you don't have on your site. Place your analytics tag at the bottom of your page right above the closing body tag.

Enjoy your new page speed gains :)