How to See Site Speed in Google Analytics 4

Tracking your site's speed is essential for user experience and SEO, but finding that data in Google Analytics 4 can feel like a scavenger hunt. GA4 handles performance reporting differently than Universal Analytics, shifting the focus from technical load times to user-centric interaction metrics. This article will show you exactly what's changed, where to find performance clues in GA4, and how to build a custom report to connect page speed with actual user behavior.

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Why Finding Site Speed in GA4 Feels Different

If you've just moved from Universal Analytics (UA), the first thing you probably noticed is that the straightforward "Site Speed" report is gone. There's no longer a dedicated section listing metrics like Average Page Load Time, DOM Interactive Time, or Server Response Time in a simple table. This change wasn't an oversight, it was intentional.

GA4 was built around an event-based data model, which is fundamentally different from UA's session-based model. It's designed to give you a more flexible view of how users interact with your site, focusing on actions rather than just pageviews. As user experience optimization has evolved, Google has also shifted the industry’s focus toward Core Web Vitals (CWV) - a set of specific, user-focused metrics that measure real-world user experience for loading performance, interactivity, and visual stability.

Because of this, GA4 de-emphasizes old client-side speed metrics in its standard reports. But don't worry, you can still get the insights you need - you just have to combine GA4's behavioral data with the right tool for measuring technical performance.

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Your New Best Friend for Site Speed: Google Search Console

Before you even start building reports in GA4, your first stop for analyzing site speed should be Google Search Console (GSC). This is Google's preferred tool for monitoring Core Web Vitals and it presents the data in a clear, actionable way.

How to Find the Core Web Vitals Report

Finding your site's performance data in GSC is incredibly simple:

1. Log in to your Google Search Console account.
2. In the left-hand navigation menu, under the "Experience" section, click on Core Web Vitals.
3. Here, you will see two reports: one for Mobile and one for Desktop.

GSC conveniently groups your site's URLs into three buckets: "Poor," "Needs improvement," and "Good." This instantly tells you where to focus your attention. Clicking into a report shows you which specific metrics are causing problems and which URLs are affected.

Understanding the Core Web Vitals Metrics

GSC focuses on three key metrics that directly impact user experience:

• Largest Contentful Paint (LCP): This measures how long it takes for the largest image or block of text to become visible on the screen. A good LCP score gives the user confidence that the page is actually loading. Aim for less than 2.5 seconds.
• Interaction to Next Paint (INP): INP measures the overall responsiveness of your page to user interactions, like clicks or taps. It shows how quickly the page reacts and gives visual feedback. A good score is under 200 milliseconds. (INP replaced First Input Delay (FID) as a Core Web Vital in March 2024).
• Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS): This metric measures visual stability. It quantifies how much a page's content shifts around unexpectedly as it loads (like when an ad suddenly appears and pushes the text you were reading down). It’s incredibly frustrating for users. Aim for a score below 0.1.

Use GSC as your definitive source for identifying slow pages. Once you have your list of "Poor" or "Needs improvement" URLs, you can jump into GA4 to understand how those technical issues are affecting your users and your business.

Finding Performance Clues Inside Google Analytics 4

Now that you know which pages are slow, you can use GA4 to figure out the impact of that slowness. The goal is to cross-reference the data from GSC with GA4’s behavioral metrics to build a complete picture.

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Correlating Engagement with Pages in Standard Reports

The quickest way to check a page’s performance is in the standard "Pages and screens" report.

1. In GA4, go to Reports in the left-hand navigation.
2. Click on Engagement > Pages and screens.

This report shows you a list of your most-viewed pages along with key metrics like Views, Users, and Average engagement time. While "Average engagement time" can be an indicator of a user having a positive experience, a very low engagement time on a page you expect users to read can be a red flag. It might mean the page loaded so slowly that users bounced before they even started interacting.

Here’s the workflow:

• Take one of the slow URLs you identified in Google Search Console.
• Use the search bar in the "Pages and screens" report to find that specific page path.
• Look at its metrics. Do you notice a lower-than-average engagement time? A high exit rate (which you'd have to calculate)? Fewer conversions originating from this page?

This process gives you evidence that the technical speed problem is leading to a tangible business problem, like lost engagement or conversions.

Building a Custom Performance Report in Explorations

For a more powerful and repeatable analysis, you need to build a free-form report in the "Explore" section. This allows you to combine dimensions and metrics that aren’t available together in the standard reports.

Let's create a report that shows key engagement and conversion metrics on a page-by-page basis, segmented by device type. This will help you quickly spot if poor mobile speed, for example, is harming your conversion rates.

Step 1: Create a New Exploration

Navigate to the Explore section in the left-hand menu and click on Free-form to create a new report.

Step 2: Import Your Dimensions

In the "Variables" column on the left, click the "+" symbol next to "Dimensions." Search for and import the following:

• Page path and screen class
• Device category
• Browser

Step 3: Import Your Metrics

Now, do the same for "Metrics." Click the "+" icon and import these:

• Sessions
• Total users
• Average engagement time
• Conversions (select any specific conversions you want to track, like purchase or generate_lead)

Step 4: Build Your Report

Drag and drop your imported variables into the "Tab Settings" column:

• Rows: Drag Page path and screen class here.
• Columns: Drag Device category here. This will create separate columns for desktop, mobile, and tablet.
• Values: Drag Sessions, Average engagement time, and Conversions here.

You now have a detailed table showing precisely how users behave on each page, broken down by whether they are on a mobile device or a desktop computer.

Step 5: Analyze the Insights

This is where the magic happens. Look at your report and cross-reference it with the slow pages from GSC. Ask yourself these questions:

• Do the "Poor" URLs from my GSC report have a significantly lower conversion rate on mobile compared to desktop?
• Is the "Average engagement time" extremely low for those slow pages, indicating users are leaving in frustration?
• Can I spot any pages with a lot of sessions but very few conversions? Those are prime candidates for speed optimization.

This custom report directly links the technical issues found in GSC to business outcomes measured in GA4, giving you a strong case for prioritizing fixes.

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For a Deeper Dive: Sending Custom Speed Metrics to GA4

If you're a more advanced user and absolutely need client-side timing metrics inside GA4, the official solution is to send them yourself using Google Tag Manager (GTM). This approach offers ultimate flexibility but requires some technical setup.

The basic idea is to:

1. Capture Performance Data: Use custom JavaScript variables in GTM to access the browser's Navigation Timing API. This API holds granular data points like page load time and time to interactive.
2. Create an Event: Set up a custom event in GTM (e.g., performance_timing).
3. Send the Data: Attach the captured performance metrics as event parameters to your new event and send them to GA4.

Once configured, you could build an Exploration report using these custom metrics. For most users, however, the workflow of using GSC for technical metrics and GA4 for behavioral impact analysis is more than sufficient and much simpler to manage.

Final Thoughts

Finding site speed data in GA4 is less about finding a single report and more about adopting a new workflow. By using Google Search Console to pinpoint technical speed issues and GA4's Explorations to measure the impact on user behavior, you can get a far more meaningful understanding of your site's performance.

Building these reports and connecting data across different platforms can feel tedious, especially when you have to do it every week. We built Graphed to remove this friction. After connecting your Google Analytics and Google Search Console accounts, you can simply ask a question like, "Show a dashboard of my slowest pages and their conversion rates from GA4." We instantly build a live, shareable dashboard for you, turning hours of report-building into a 30-second task so you can get back to improving your site.