In a post on Wednesday, Trevor Claibourne of the Google Analytics Team announced that connection speed tracking will be removed from the Google Analytics product.

This could be seen as a surprising move considering Google’s views on website speed, but is it?

Claibourne assures those that use the Connection Speed reports “to understand the effect of page load time and latency” that they’re working on an alternative solution. But have people been able to glean any useful information from these reports?

Profiling visitors on connection speed does nothing to improve the speed of a website. We actually believe the opposite to be true. Consider a report that shows 80% of a sites’ visitors are on high-speed connections – does a designer take the decision to include a fancy graphic as 80% will be largely unaffected? Most likely yes, but this is flawed reasoning.

The crux of any design element – especially when there is a performance overhead – is whether or not it is necessary. If the graphic is necessary then it belongs there – if it’s not, remove it. If it is necessary, what’s the level of quality required? If an image looks fine at JPEG60 then you wouldn’t host it at JPEG100, regardless of how many visitors are on high-speed connections.

Reports like this go against the ideas of website optimization – they encourage those whose visitors are on fast connections to abuse those connections by adding unnecessary content to their sites. A site should never be slower that it needs to be, whatever your audience, and all this report has ever done is detail that audience.