Comment on Technical Support by SEO Dave.

WordPress Technical Support Everything you add to a website that either means downloading more code or files or requires access to a database etc… will have an impact on site speed.

The more features you add slower a site will load, whether this is Google Analytics code, FaceBook Like buttons, AdSense ads, fancy slider features that require Jquery etc…

You decide if a feature is worth the performance hit. Note the vast majority of Stallion features have been coded in away to either improve performance or minimize any negative hit (can’t remove it completely, you want a feature it comes at a resource cost).

For example image sliders are a nice flashy feature and all I’ve looked at require Jquery (a 100KB plus sized javascript file) to work, but research shows visitors don’t click on image sliders that are added just to look cool. Since visitors don’t use sliders and they have a big performance hit, I never use an image slider. The Stallion slider uses Jquery, I added it before performance was a big SEO issue, I’ve minimized the performance hit using the Stallion slider by only loading Jquery on pages the slider loads on, but it’s still a performance hit.

AdSense has a performance hit, but it makes money, so I use AdSense. If you use the AdSense responsive code and use the Stallion load the AdSense javascript file in the footer the performance hit is less than using the original AdSense responsive code.

Google Analytics has a performance hit, but it provides invaluable SEO information, so I use Google Analytics.

Note the performance hit for Google Analytics is relatively small, it’s a small amount of inline javascript code (won’t have a major speed impact) and loads a small off site javascript file that’s only cached for 2 hrs which because it’s only cached for 2 hours throws out a performance warning on Google PageSpeed Insights Tool.

Consider millions of websites use Google analytics so odds are when a visitor loads your website the Google analytics javascript file is probably already cached on their PC. The 2 hour cache means when anyone is browsing the Internet when they visit a site that uses Google analytics they cache the javascript file. For the next 2 hours their web browser will use the cached file so if they visit your site in the 2 hour period they won’t have to download it again. After 2 hours it’s cached again next time they visit a site with Google Analytics installed.

So yes their is a performance hit using Google analytics tracking, but if you find the data useful (I do) it’s worth it. If you never look at the analytics data because you track visitors another way, not much point collecting it.

David