Question

My google analytics is supposed to load asynchronously. I am not sure really what this means:

<script type="text/javascript">
        var _gaq = _gaq || [];
        _gaq.push(['_setAccount', 'xxx']);
        _gaq.push(['_trackPageview']);

        (function () {
            var ga = document.createElement('script'); ga.type = 'text/javascript'; ga.async = true;
            ga.src = ('https:' == document.location.protocol ? 'https://ssl' : 'http://www') + '.google-analytics.com/ga.js';
            var s = document.getElementsByTagName('script')[0]; s.parentNode.insertBefore(ga, s);
        })();
    </script>

I don’t need jQuery to be available immediately. Is there a way I can also make this asynchronous?

Answer 1

Google Analytics is loading asynchronously in your example. The part that handles that is ga.async = true;. Asynchronous means that the browser will continue to load rest of the content even if this one takes longer to load. In older browser, the content would be loaded in the order of the document and if something was slow to load, it would take longer for the browser to display the page.

If you want jQuery to load asynchronously, simply add async="async" to your <script> tag. Please keep in mind that only newer browser support this.

Alternatively, Google does offer Google Loader which allows you to load jQuery and many other libraries asynchronously. You can have a look at this Stack Overflow question for an example.