News sites suck in terms of performance

These days, it's almost a painful experience reading newspaper news online.

It's just generally a pain to read these news sites. Because they are soooooo sloooooooow. Your whole browser is stuttering and coughing blood and every click feels like a battle.

The culprit is generally that these sites are so full of crap. Like click trackers, ads, analytics trackers, videos, lots of images and heavy Javascript.

Here's a slight comparison (in no particular order) of various popular news websites (using a DSL connection):

Wow! That's an average of...

• 34.2 seconds per page
• 278 requests per page
• 4,643 KB per page

That is just too much. I appreciate that these news companies that make these sites need to make a living and most of the explanation of the slow-down is the ads. Almost always, if you click to open one of those pages, it's just a matter of sitting and waiting. It loading in a background tab takes so much resources you feel it in other tabs. And by the time you go to view and you start scrolling your computer starts to cough blood and crying for mercy.

But what about the user? Imagine if you simply pull out of some of the analytics trackers and opt for simple images for the ads and just simplify the documents down to the minimum? Google Search does this and they seem to do OK in terms of ad revenue.

An interesting counter-example; this page on nytimes.com is a long article and when you load it on WebPageTest it yields a result of 163 requests. But if you use your browser dev tools and keep an eye on all network traffic as you slowly scroll down the length of the article all the way down to the footer, you notice it downloads an additional 331 requests. It starts with about 2KB of data but by the time you've downloaded to the end and scrolled past all ads and links it's amassed about 5.5KB of data. I think that's fair. At least the inital feeling when you arrive on the page isn't that of disgust.

Another realization I've found whilst working on this summary is that oftentimes, sites that are REALLY really slow and horrible to use don't necessarily have super many external resources from different domains but they just have far far too much Javascript. This random page on Washington Times for example has 209 Javascript files that together weighs 9.4KB (roughly 8 times the amount of image data). Not only does that need to be downloaded. It also needs to be parsed and I bet a zillion event handlers and DOM manipulators kick in and basically make scrolling a crying game even on a fast desktop computer.

And then it hit me!

We've all been victims of websites annoyingly try to lure you to install their native app when trying to visit their website on a smartphone. The reason they're doing that is because they've been given a second chance to build something without eleventeen iframes and 4MB of Javascript so the native app feels a million better because they've started over and gotten things right.

My parting advice to newspapers who can do something about their website; Radically refactor your code. Question EVERYTHING and delete, remove and clean up things that doesn't add value. You might lose some stats and you might not be able to show as much ads but if your site loads faster you'll get a lot more visitors and a lot more potential to earn bigger $$$ on fewer more targetted ads.