What impact does the Online Store Speed Report have on small sites?

[TheDigitalYeti]

Hi Shopify Community,

Since Shopify launched the new Online Store Speed Report feature I have noticed some strange visits coming to my site. After some searching I found these two topics as well;

https://community.shopify.com/c/Shopify-Discussion/What-causes-these-odd-repeat-visitors-to-our-site...

https://community.shopify.com/c/Shopify-Discussion/Council-Bluffs-visits/td-p/846963

I have been doing some research and found out the cause, the Shopify Speed Report. Shopify runs the speed report using a Google Developer tool (the Google data centre is based in Council Bluffs, USA) which tests 3 pages, Homepage, a popular collection page and a popular product page. Shopify then compares this result to other similar Shopify sites. This test is run daily.

For some sites this is not a problem, but for some smaller sites this can screw with your analytics and conversion rate metrics. If you get 3000 hits a day, 3 extra visits is not an issue - it's only 0.1%. Not every site is as big as that. My site is small and got tested twice today for some reason.

So if this feature is negatively affecting you, make sure to reach out to Shopify and ask them to turn it off.

Better yet ask them to give you, the store owner, the choice of when or if your site is tested. Manually, Daily, Weekly, Monthly or Annually.

[TheDigitalYeti]

I have raised this issue with Shopify support, they have done some testing and managed to replicate my results.

They agree that this is an issue and have put it on the development list.

Make sure you reach out to Shopify and let them know if this affects you and how you would like the speed test to work for you in the future.

[Ivanm]

Thank you for taking the time to post about this, I was wondering where the hits were coming from.

I won't worry about reaching out to them to change it, as long as I know why the hits are being made and that there's nothing more sinister behind it that's ok.

I can exclude these in my reporting so no harm done.

[wbfagallery]

Thank you, Yeti. Your analysis is spot on. Google Analytics does NOT record these "mystery" Council Bluffs sessions.  And since Google Analytics requires the client software initiating store sessions to have JavaScript active, this is a sure sign that this is a robotic process, and not being initiated by a human. It also makes sense that Shopify is performing these speed checks across the scope of the three primary page types, so I have no intention to request that Shopify stop doing them. But since I too am just starting out and will never have a large number of sessions day-to-day anyway, it's just helpful to know what these Council Bluff sessions are all about to avoid the let down when I see that there were three new sessions overnight that were not prospective customers.

[Yaelika33]

Hi I can tell you that 2 years later this issue is still present.

i received 96 visits from this city on first day of my website going live.

it is a major issue as it change the statistics once a month. 
kr,

yael 

[enaya]

Same on my end... 2023 and still going on.

[LVM]

45 times just today! How do I contact Shopify to make this stop?

[Gazza1234]

im getting the same - site went live yesterday and ive had over 150 hits from council bluffs.

due to the fact that my site is new and only just gone live on google will this affect my rankings

[BoisFrancK]

Same problem here, we had 90 visits/day last 3 month. It blurs our stats continously. WE just have like 140 visits/day on our website

[HarvickFarms]

Any solution to this problem? I just started to get approximately 400 hits to our website from what appears to be this speed test coming from 5 main locations to 5 direct blog post. It comes into our report as “direct” so there is not a great way to filter them out on the report. I don’t want to filter my location because some of these locations will actually be some of our targeted marketing areas so I would want to see the effectiveness of our targeted marketing. 

Any suggestions?