Alex Russell posted some interesting stuff on his blog regarding the Google Analytics tracking script (ga.js) and how to make it load faster.
Because ga.js script is quite big (9 kb archived and 22 kb unachieved) and also it uses document.write() which is a blocking, synchronous operation WRT page loading. This is tres dumb. Reasonable people should just include ga.js with a <script> tag, but nearly nobody does. Turns out that sane defaults still matter.
He posted an alternative which you can use instead of Google Analytics script:
The strategy is to load Dojo from a CDN (since the page wanted it for other things) and wait until after the page has loaded to include ga.js. This delayed loading ensures that the page is responsive before we start doing anything related to tracking. The nested calls to dojo.addOnLoad show how we can wait for one set of modules to finish before kicking off another group, and in this case we also wait until after the page is responsive to load dojox.analytics.Urchin. This module further delays loading of ga.js, meaning that it doesn’t matter how long it takes for things like DNS to resolve and for Google to serve ga.ja since it’s not ever blocking the user.
Because ga.js script is quite big (9 kb archived and 22 kb unachieved) and also it uses document.write() which is a blocking, synchronous operation WRT page loading. This is tres dumb. Reasonable people should just include ga.js with a <script> tag, but nearly nobody does. Turns out that sane defaults still matter.
He posted an alternative which you can use instead of Google Analytics script:
<script type="text/javascript"
src="http://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/dojo/1.3/dojo/dojo.xd.js">
</script>
<script type="text/javascript">
dojo.addOnLoad(function(){
setTimeout(function(){
dojo.require("dojox.analytics.Urchin")
dojo.addOnLoad(function(){
var tracker = new dojox.analytics.Urchin({
acct: "UA-XXXXXX-X" // your tracking # here
})
})
}, 100)
})
</script>
The strategy is to load Dojo from a CDN (since the page wanted it for other things) and wait until after the page has loaded to include ga.js. This delayed loading ensures that the page is responsive before we start doing anything related to tracking. The nested calls to dojo.addOnLoad show how we can wait for one set of modules to finish before kicking off another group, and in this case we also wait until after the page is responsive to load dojox.analytics.Urchin. This module further delays loading of ga.js, meaning that it doesn’t matter how long it takes for things like DNS to resolve and for Google to serve ga.ja since it’s not ever blocking the user.
