Very little I'd say. Especially as the advice is to put it in your footer, it should load last, by which time people will be looking at your content/images anyway. 2 cents
I confirm pooting it in the footer helps a lot, sometimes (once in many pageviews) for some reason analytics seems to load a bit slow but that is no problem if the rest of your page has already been loaded
I see that my page loads fast. But on the status bar it still shows loading for a long time. Anyways mine is a 10Mbps connections. So, I guess it loads in 10-15 secs.. but what if someone with a 56Kbps load my page?!!
Try a test service like this if you think you're site might be loading slowly; http://rapid.searchmetrics.com/en/seo-tools/site-analysis/website-speed-test,46.html but try a few as if THEY are hosted on small servers THEY will download slowly and give rubbish results. @excello: It is not faster to put it in the footer, but *better* as all your HTML loads and is displayed first. The GA urchin can then load while visitors are already browsing, it therefore has no impact on their site experience.
No No. The page contents are loaded, but the page shows still loading on the status bar and seems like stuck for a few secs. However its ok. Its better than waiting for the whole page to load for a long time.
Put a compression on ur site like a mod_deflate mod_gzip or zlib! Your page will definitely get under 10kb for sure and as everyone mentioned here as long as that code stays in the footer it will load last, after your content loads. Actually get an add-on extension for Firebug like Page speed, like Google WM recommends or Yslow. You can measure your speed with or without it and make a judgment.
I think page load time would be more relevant to the consumer no matter how Google might treat it. If a page loads slow most likely the consumer is going to go somewhere else. I know I do.
I am not pretty sure about these compression techniques. How does it work? I mean, what does it actually do? Will it have any negative effects on different browsers?
I spent the last 3 days optimizing my site, with trying to enable compression, since my host had disabled it and will not enable it! If that the case there's always zlib that does it through php. According to most of the material on google over 90% of the browsers now days support gzip. I will not be able to explain it better than them sites, so just search on "gzip compressing for website" and a lot of material would come out. There r more tips than just compress, there also minify css and js codes and combine all into one and stuff.
In my experience Analytics doesn't impact page render time in any noticeable way. As long as it's located at the end of a page right before the </body> element it shouldn't impact your load time either.
I have analytics on in the header of our site and have no problems that we are aware of in loading time. We would appreciate any feed back.... WWW.FindMyNewHomeInTexas.com