Forum Moderators: DixonJones
Is there a definitive way of implementing these tags to ensure no site slowdown? Or any documented evidence that this does not effect the site performance?
I suggested that the java tags be put in the footer so that it is the last thing to load, but they are still concerned that it will cause problems with the shopping cart.
Anyone?
Munst
The trouble is that the JS file is loaded from Google servers... sometimes they are fast but from time to time they are slow.
You are right that if you put the call to the JS before the </body> that your content will load before the Google code.
Your developers are right to warn you but it isn't enough reason to not have the tracking code if you think you will benefit from it.
Unless the shopping cart is poorly written it shouldn't interfere.
The developers should be able to put this to the test with perfmon or a client-side test tool.
Do the developers have any idea of what degree of slowdown would be unacceptable i.e. change visitors' immediate or long-term behavior?
What do the developers suggest doing instead? No analytics at all? How does management feel about that?
Tell them to step up!
I like to enclose my analytics snippets within a DIV that specifies height and width (usually 1x1), as well as putting it very last on the page.
Google seem to have addressed the server speed problem, and of course, you can now put the code as low in the HTML as possible (i.e. just before </body>) so the worst downside if Google's servers are slow or unavailable is the browser might indicate that the page has not finished loading. The content should still display fine.
Of course, you should try to avoid ever relying on third party code for key elements of a page to run successfully.
if Google's servers are slow or unavailable is the browser might indicate that the page has not finished loading
Through several implementations, this is about the only performance issue I've run into.
In one case, it did have some unintended consequences. One particular e-commerce site I work with had product pages with literally hundreds of related products on a single page. During times of high server load, these pages could take some time to finish loading. The programmers added a "Page Loading" icon so users would know that more products were still coming up. To do this, they were loading a javascript from within the body tag.
The result was that the "Page Loading" icon would continue to run until the GA script had finished. Sometimes this was a surprisingly long time (upwards of 60 seconds).
Moral --> be careful how you use the body tag when implementing 3rd party scripts from within the body.
heavy reluctance from our developers to put Google Analytics tags on our ecommerce site
Incidentally, they are likely wrong that this will have any impact, but I'm usually much more happy with a cautious developer than one who will slap any old code anywhere without any questions ;)
Our site currently has a number of tags on it including Atlas and Doubleclick (for affiliates and banners) Surfaid (our current analytics. Recently they inserted tags for InQ (similar to Liveperson) and a conflict occurred with the Atlas tags which caused pages not to load even though the tags were at the bottom of the page.
Can anyone suggest a way that we can test or analyse the JS for potential conflicts before implementation?
