Does Freshpaint's Autotrack slow my site down?

This doc covers information on Freshpaint's Autotrack data collection javascript snippet on site performance and page speed.

Does Autotrack make my site take longer to load?

In practice, no. Freshpaint's Autotrack javascript snippet is asynchronous. This means that all of your site's content will load without Freshpaint's snippet blocking anything from loading.

There’s two different ways to measure how long it takes your site to load.

1. The first is how long it takes for all the visible content on your site to load, commonly referred to as “domComplete”.

2. The second is the time it takes for all the content on your site, called “fullyLoaded”.

When optimizing page load time, you want to optimize for the time until domComplete because that is how long your users will perceive your site takes to load. domComplete is the correct metric for your users' experience.

The way Autotrack works is there is small javascript snippet you add to your site. When ran, that snippet will load a larger snippet. Loading the larger snippet is done in the background and does not prevent the content of your site from loading.

This means Autotrack does not increase the domComplete time. OTOH autotrack can increase the fullyLoaded time since loading the larger snippet is included in the fullyLoaded time.

Does autotrack make actions on my site slower?

No, Autotrack is actually very lightweight.

Autotrack works by adding an onclick handler to your site. Whenever a user clicks on your site, we run a small bit of javascript to check if any events match. If so, we send an event to the designated Destinations. This will only slow down your site if you have a large number of events created in Freshpaint (on the order of several thousand events).

If you are worried about Autotrack slowing your site down, you can take advantage of our server-side Destinations which perform the event matching on our servers. Contact Us to learn more.