How to Boost Site Speed by Hosting gtag.js Locally

Does Google Analytics slow down your website? Unfortunately, yes.

Google Analytics is a freemium web analytics tool offered by Google that tracks website traffic and visitors to your website such as:

• Number of people visit your website
• Visitor’s age & gender
• What devices are used

It is the most widely used web analytics tool on the Internet. However, additional scripts like Google Analytics will slow down your website.

Well, why do people care about site speed? Your site speed directly affects Google search ranking.

Google search ranking was calculated by these factors:

• Mobile-friendly
• Safe browsing
• HTTPS
• No intrusive interstitials

In addition, Google added these new considerations: loading, interactivity, and visual stability in May 2021.

How long your website takes to display all of the contents? How long your website takes to submit a form, click a link, or tap on a button? How long your website takes to display all of the fonts or images?

In order to improve your Google search ranking, you need to improve all of these.

According to a study, 47% of users expect a page to load in 2 seconds or less. 40% of users will abandon a web page if it takes more than 3 seconds to load. In other words, site speed optimization is a must-have strategy for your website useability, not only for SEO.

Now, how to evaluate your site performance? How to improve your site speed? WordPress plugin MonsterInsights is one of the best solutions!

In this post, you’ll learn how to boost your site speed with MonsterInsights.

DISCLOSURE: This post may contain affiliate links, meaning I get a small commission if you decide to make a purchase through my links, at no additional cost to you. This is a sponsored blog post, but all opinions are my own. Please read my full disclaimer here for more info.

First, what is MonsterInsights?

MonsterInsights is a plugin that allows you to easily add, customize, and manage Google Analytics on your WordPress site. You can also check and improve your site speed.

Most SEO-related plugins are not easy to use. They look complicated and take little time to get used to it. However, MonsterInsights is very easy to use and navigate. It’s the most user-friendly Google Analytics plugin I’ve known of.

It is a free and premium plugin for WordPress. The Plus plan (the most basic one) costs $99.50 a year and the Pro plan (most suggested one) costs $199.50 a year.

How to check your page speed in WordPress?

Once you’ve installed and activated the MonsterInsights plugin, integrate your MonsterInsights account and Google Analytics account.

“Integrate” seems may be difficult for non-techy people but don’t worry. MonsterInsights make it super easy for us.

Here are 3 Easy Steps to integrate MonsterInsights and Google Analytics.

After the integration, you can check server response time, visual elements loading speed, time to interact, and total blocking time by clicking “Site Speed” on the main menu. Yes, you don’t need extra setting for that.

This site speed report covered all of Core Web Vitals including “mobile-friendly.” If something is slow down your website, MonsterInsights show you the solution. All you have to do is follow the instruction they provide.

Why MonsterInsights speed up your site?

By default, the script will be cached by Google every two hours. Caching is the process of storing copies of files in a temporary storage location. By storing all the data, users don’t need to load all the data every time they access the website.

But this caching process slows down your site speed. If you use a lot of JavaScript tagging frameworks and API on your website, it might take a little longer than usual.

MonsterInsights allows you to host the gtag.js script locally on your own server to make the caching process faster. You can reduce the number of external resources your website has to load by using your own server.

And also, the addon will automatically fetch the latest gtag.js file from Google every 24 hours to make sure it’s the newest version. This is an optional setting and it’s totally up to you. You just need to toggle on or off for this setting. Very easy.

If you trying to do all of these by yourself, you need coding skills and knowledge. With MonsterInsights, you just need to install and activate the plugin. That’s all. I think it’s one of the most affordable and easy solutions to speed up your site.

Wrapping Up

There are so many caching plugins on WordPress. A caching plugin saves static HTML pages of your website on a server. So, your site visitor doesn’t have to load the whole page every time they visit your site.

You can analyze your website traffic and target audience as well as boot site speed by installing MonsterInsights. It’s like an all-in-one solution. You don’t have to install some plugins for Google Analytics, and some plugins for caching plugins.

If you want to know more details about the MonsterInsights plugin, visit their website here.