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Google Analytics Alternatives: Testing PageSpeed Performance

Ben Word Ben Word on

A new analytics service seems to pop up every week. Whenever you’re adding a new third-party script to your site, it’s always important to consider what affects they might have on your site performance.

I created a barebones static site and deployed it to Netlify for testing some of the most popular Google Analytics alternatives: Fathom Analytics, Pirsch Analytics, Plausible Analytics, Simple Analytics, and Umami.

The test site

The markup of the test site was extremely basic:

<!doctype html>
<html lang="en-US">
<head>
    <meta charset="utf-8">
    <meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width, initial-scale=1">
    <title>Analytics PSI Testing</title>
    <meta name="description" content="Testing PSI scores with different web analytics services">
</head>
<body>
    <h1>Analytics PSI Testing</h1>
    <p>Testing PSI scores with different web analytics services</p>
</body>
</html>

For each test, the analytics script provided by each service was added before the </body> tag.

The test site was ran through https://pagespeed.web.dev/ three different times, each using a unique query string (eg. /analyticsServiceName1, /analyticsServiceName2, /analyticsServiceName3). The data below shows the worst results that were reported from the three analyzations.

Fathom Analytics

CategoryScore
Performance100
Accessibility100
Best Practices100
SEO100

Performance diagnostics

  • Avoid long main-thread tasks
URLStart TimeDuration
/script.js (cdn.usefathom.com)1,653 ms60 ms

Pirsch Analytics

CategoryScore
Performance100
Accessibility100
Best Practices100
SEO100

Performance diagnostics

  • Avoid long main-thread tasks
URLStart TimeDuration
/pirsch.js (api.pirsch.io)1,611 ms91 ms

Plausible Analytics

CategoryScore
Performance100
Accessibility100
Best Practices100
SEO100

Performance diagnostics

  • Avoid long main-thread tasks
URLStart TimeDuration
/js/script.js (plausible.io)1,633 ms67 ms

Simple Analytics

CategoryScore
Performance94
Accessibility100
Best Practices100
SEO100

Performance diagnostics

  • Reduce the impact of third-party code — Third-party code blocked the main thread for 300 ms
Third-PartyTransfer SizeMain-Thread Blocking Time
simpleanalyticscdn.com5 KiB296 ms
/latest.js (scripts.simpleanalyticscdn.com)5 KiB296 ms
  • Avoid long main-thread tasks
URLStart TimeDuration
/latest.js (scripts.simpleanalyticscdn.com)1,607 ms349 ms

Umami

CategoryScore
Performance100
Accessibility100
Best Practices92
SEO100

Performance diagnostics

  • Avoid long main-thread tasks
URLStart TimeDuration
/script.js (analytics.umami.is)1,605 ms53 ms

Best practices

  • Browser errors were logged to the console
SourceDescription
/api/send:1:0 (analytics.umami.is)Failed to load resource: the server responded with a status of 401 (Unauthorized)

Conclusion

Overall this test wasn’t very exciting. Simple Analytics was the only service tested that resulted in a performance hit. With new Google Analytics alternatives regularly being built, make sure to look into how they might affect the performance of your website if you choose to implement one.

About the author

Ben Word

Ben Word has been creating WordPress sites since 2004. He loves dogs, climbing, and yoga, and is passionate about helping people build awesome things on the web.

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