Isn't this a good thing? One part of Google made a tool that evaluates performance and they're not giving any preference to their other tools, despite also being made by Google.<p>If they hadn't objectively penalized you, everyone would be complaining that Google gave preferential treatment to their own products.
Tangent: I find GA to be mostly useless nowadays for any website used by a more tech savvy community. When comparing the GA results to server logs and a separate JS logging script, and already discounting for bots, it's clear GA is only counting about 10% of my visits.<p>Too many people blocking that script. I have about 20 different sites using it that I manage in some form bit cannot couch for it anymore.
Lighthouse / PSI scores are irrelevant to search ranking.<p>Data from the Chrome UX Report (CrUX) is going to be used in results ranking as part of the page experience update - this comes from real-world usage of Chrome<p>GA affecting Lighthouse scores may be a good storyline for Simple Analytics (and there are plenty of reasons not to use GA) but you can still use GA and pass all the core web vitals
Using GA isn't bad because there are two ways to run it.<p>First is when GA script is on <head> section. This is mostly popular, but making CWV scores little bit low.<p>Second is when GA script is anywhere on page, but not on <head>. Like before </body> or in <body>. This doesn't hurt your CWV scores.
Official statement from Google's John Mueller regarding this: <a href="https://twitter.com/JohnMu/status/1389322980547833856" rel="nofollow">https://twitter.com/JohnMu/status/1389322980547833856</a><p>"No, it's not the case that we penalize for Google Analytics. We don't special-case Google products in Search, but that goes both ways. The LH score is not what we use in Search, but my ancient WP + GA site is 100 there." John Mueller
BTW, the same is true for Google Fonts. These prove to be the major bottleneck on my sites. (Since I'm hosting fonts locally, these are at 100% performance or close. We may argue that in practice these fonts would probably have been available in cache, but this tends to be less a thing, compare Firefox privacy policies.) This is actually a testament to the neutrality of Lighthouse.
This has frustrated me so much, as I spend a lot of time optimizing web performance. Gtag.js is pushed by analytics, however after loading it then async loads analytics.js. It is very inefficient, especially for sites that do not much more than track page views. It is the worst scoring factor on sites I optimize because there’s very little you can do about it without hacks.
Looks like they're deploying the Simple Analytics script directly in the page source and the Google Analytics script via Google Tag Manager. Though Google Analytics through Google Tag Manager might be the Google-recommended way to deploy Google Analytics, this isn't exactly an apples-to-apples comparison. Would be interesting to see if Google Analytics directly in the page had a different score than through Google Tag Manager. That said, I would almost always trade the miniscule score penalty for serving something through Google Tag Manager (including Simple Analytics) for ease of maintenance.
I really wish Google would split Analytics into two products. One for "advanced" website operators and one for "simple" users, aka business owners aka <i>real</i> people, not professional data analysts.<p>The problem is that most of my clients don't care enough about their stats to pay $19/month. So they opt for the "free" option (Google Analytics) which is now being positioned for the high-end market.
I like the idea of Simple Analytics but that pricing model is out of reach open source projects like PortableApps.com. Separating out by page views is tough when I only need a single user and don't care about support. $600 a year for up to a million page views per month and "contact us" for more means it'd probably be at least a couple thousand dollars a year.
My biggest complaint is that Lighthouse has a longstanding open bug where out-of-process iframes are counted in the main thread, thus causing third party embeds to wildly degrade the LH score, even when real performance is not affected much. This even happens to Google's own YouTube embed. Add one YT video to a page and see how destructive it is to a LH score. It's really difficult to explain to customers when they track their LH score like a professional bodybuilder tracks fat percentages.
I tried both Simple Analytics & Plausible but both are blocked by Adblockers which made then useless to us.<p>In the end - ditched Google Analytics and just use log files & sales data.
Hello, this is stupid.
Google doesn't penalize you for using GA, but because you're not using it the right way.
If you want to use GA without JS overhead, use their API and build your own JS friendly tracker.
That's why I use <a href="https://github.com/jehna/ga-lite/" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/jehna/ga-lite/</a>. It saves a roundtrip and is quite small.
You should see how much Facebook’s tracker impacts performance! GA does a relatively good job at not impacting performance compared with others. Not defending GA though, just whining about FB. :)
I'm using Google Analytics to track pageview count on a website and it does appear to add around 0.4sec to Time-To-Interactive of the PageSpeed score.<p>And the GA script size is about 40KB.
Anyone who takes this article seriously has (A) not read how to lie with statistics (B) does not analyze bias in articles based on the person writing it and (C) is directly contributing to a society of misinformation.
Google doesn't penalize sites in any way if you're using their products (like GA or embedding a YouTube video). This is just silly and flat out wrong to say that Google penalizes you for using Google Analytics. It's flat-out wrong and untrue.<p>It's kind of like saying that buying Google Ads will boost your website's organic search engine rankings.<p>I really suggest that SimpleAnalytics.com update the title tag on this, as it's just wrong. Period.<p>That doesn't mean that using Google Analytics doesn't slow down your site (a bit) and Google should speed it up. I've had that complaint for years now, and Google just hasn't done anything about it that we can noticeably see.