Google Analytics and Website Optimization

Most of you maybe still asking, what is the best statistic tool to use on my homepage ? if that’s what you’ve been asking in alot of discussion forum available in the internet. Then you should give Google Analytics a try. Although it’s not an integrated tool that can be viewed under the admin section of your website, but this tracking tool can give you a detailed statistic for your website, for example you can see what browser used by your visitor, your visitor connection speed, operating system used, flash version used, and so on.

And here’s an example what Google Analytics stats looks like :

Browser Version Used :

Connection Speed of your visitors :

Language used by your visitors :

Browser and Operating System used by your visitors :

The most important statistic to read is the visitor connection speed, screen resolution and browser used. Because no matter how great your site looks if it can’t be viewed by your visitor browser correctly they don’t want to visit your site again so try opening your website using different browser. Other than that if your site is using alot of graphic or flash, think about it’s filesize too. Because if most of your visitor still using a Dial Up connection they’ll leave your website before your website fully loaded into their browser. But if your site is using Flash, consider to use standard effect, because you don’t know what processor your visitor using and in the end they will leave your site because your site causing major slowdown to their system.

After you’re sure that you’ve taken the above steps, try checking your page size using free services from WebsiteOptimization or Web Sniffer, and see what’s the size of your webpages.

Another thing to consider is try using GZip Compression (if it’s supported by your server / webhosting) and you’re using a dynamic pages. Because by using GZip compression you can reduce your pagesize into a small size. For example my site pagesize is 49.79 Kb and after compressed by GZip encoding my pagesize become 11.97 Kb. But GZip only works if the visitor browser already support it (don’t worry about that because most modern browser already support GZip encoded). If you want to check if your website is already compressed by GZip encoding try using Web Sniffer services and if you see something like :

Content (encoded: 11.97 KiB / decoded: 49.79 KiB)

That means you already using a GZip compression on your website. And you should be glad that your server support it. And that’s about your website optimization tips