I use Google Analytics on my retail site and have been since about the end of September. This morning I noticed that the home page was verrrry slow to load (about 5-6 seconds on a cable modem), so I contacted Hostgator.

They checked it out and found that the server was not being flaky, but they noticed that they could see the Javascript call to the Analytics site in the status bar. I couldn’t see that myself, but I went online and found that there are a lot of comments about Analytics slowing down websites. Many of them seem to be because people put the Javascript code in the header rather than at the bottom of the page, but mine was already at the bottom, so that wasn’t it.
I was wondering if Analytics might be slammed just due to holiday browsing and shopping, so I took out the code to test it.

It didn’t help. I was hoping that was it. But it didn’t help, and there isn’t anything unusual going on with my server at Hostgator, so I’m not sure what to do except keep an eye on it.