If you've tried to build your site to 100/100 in the Google PageSpeed Insights, you might have bumped in the following warning:

As you might want to use GA in your site, the 99/100 PageSpeed score might get frustrating. Especially because Google Analytics team itself has stated it won't fix the issue.

Fixing the issue

This is why I created GA-Lite, a small subset of Google Analytics that uses the Google Analytics Measurement Protocol REST API. The library can be easily downloaded from the Github and hosted on your own server, fixing the "Leverage browser caching" warning.

If you trust me, you can also use the a CDN to load the library. This automatically sets the appropriate headers to the script so you can get the remaining GA issue solved.

How to install?

The easiest way to install the script is to include the CDN version to you HTML code:

<script src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/ga-lite/latest/ga-lite.min.js" async></script>
<script>
var galite = galite || {};
galite.UA = 'UA-XXXXXX'; // Insert your tracking code here
</script>

This adds the library to your webpage and starts sending the page views to the Google Analytics servers.

Why not to just copy the analytics.js to my server?

If you've done googling like I have, you probably have stumbled to many other solutions. Commonly they suggest that you either download the analytics.js file to your own server or use some proxy in the between.

Google itself does not recommend downloading analytics.js to your own server, so they can ensure your analytics data won't get broken after they update their code.

If you'd just copy the analytics.js file to your own server, it would potentially break at any minute. This is, because Google makes updates to their code from time to time.

So if Google changes something, that leaves your website hanging with the old version of the analytics.js, potentially breaking the analytics tracking.

What about a proxy?

The next logical step would be to use a proxy that keeps up the most current version of the script, but sets the "correct" headers for you.

This is heavily discouraged for two main reasons:

1. Google wants to keep the ownership of the script. So if they make a breaking change, every single analytics.js will be up-to-date within 2 hours. But your proxy will still keep the old script cached for longer times, breaking your site's analytics.
2. Can you really trust an outside vendor? Even if they are not evil and inject your script with spam, they could stop updating/serving the script at any time.

As a rule of thumb, you should not include any code to your website/product that you have not gone through or use a vendor that you don't trust.

The good thing about ga-lite is, that anyone can easily go through all the source code and build it themselves. And you can compare the built source code to the one in the CDN and see that they match.

Technical definition

There are a few things why ga-lite has "lite" in its name. Currently the script only tracks the page views and tries to keep the time spent on page.

The script first generates a random identifier for the user and saves it to the localStorage variable.

It then sends a pageview event to the Google's servers with 0.1 second delay after the page has been loaded. The sending is done through a well-documented Analytics Measurement Protocol REST API.

Since the Google Analytics uses events to calculate the time spent on page, the script tries to send additional ping to Google's servers on browser's unload event, which fires right after the user closes the page.

Since sending a regular, blocking request on the unload event is discouraged, ga-lite uses the new Navigator.sendBeacon API whenever it's available.

What's next?

The above walkthrough pretty much describes the ga-lite's whole functionality as it is (was) at late 2015.

Next steps will include that the script will be slowly improved to have more of the features from the full analytics.js, as they are needed by users.

If you want to request a feature, please fill in an issue, or fork the repo and create a pull request.