Does Google Analytics have performance overhead?

Question

To what extent does Google Analytics impact performance?

I\'m looking for the following:

• Benchmarks (including response times/pageload times et al)

Answer 1

You can host the ga.js on your servers with no problems whatsoever, but the idea is that your users will have the ga.js cached from some other site they may have visited. So downloading ga.js, because it's so popular, adds very little overhead in many cases (i.e., it's already been cached).

Plus, DNS lookups do not cost the same in different places due to network topology. Caching behavior would change depending on whether users use other sites that include ga.js or not.

Once the javascript has been loaded, the ga.js does communicate with Google servers, but that is an asynchronous process.

Hope this helps.