I'm willing to suffer a little bit for some great stats, but this is unbearable! I'm on a FIOS connection and after adding the code to my pages, they honestly run at dial-up speed. Can anyone recommend something that doesn't affect loading time? Maybe a php solution.
</table> <script src="http://www.google-analytics.com/urchin.js" type="text/javascript"></script> <script type="text/javascript"> _uacct = "UA-118xxxx-x"; urchinTracker(); </script> </body> </html>
Yea, I often notice sites it says transferring from google analytics, meaning the sites loaded but now the stats are loading, and it can take a while.
OK no worries, I understand. People have complained that their pages load slowly because of Analytics and I have even seen pages load slowly on different sites. If I was you I would check your site using as many different computers as possible and see if it is the same everywhere. Are you looking to use their stats for anything special? If not you might want to consider using a free counter such as www.statcounter.com - you can still hide the actual counter so your visitors are non the wiser.
So it turns out the main problem was that my host (MediaTemple) has been having problems running MySql databases for 2-3 months on their new 'GridServer' platform. Found this out the hard way when I moved my test site onto that server. I should have my test site up and running on a much more reliable platform by tomorrow. I'll test the analytics code on there and see what kind of performance issues I see, if any.