5 ms·

New Reddit’s PageSpeed Insights

18 points by taspeotis 6y ago

bstefanovic 6y ago
good, looks bad
css 6y ago
Old Reddit only 8 points better: https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fold.reddit.com%2F&tab=mobile https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/?url=... In fact, old Reddit actually has a worse time-to-interactive score and a lot more DOM elements: 1.6k for new Reddit and 2.3k for old.
- ancarda 6y ago
  If you click on the desktop tab, you'll see new Reddit is 48 whereas old Reddit is 80 - a massive improvement I think old Reddit not being mobile friendly is a big reason why its score is so low
  - threatofrain 6y ago
    https://i.reddit.com/ https://i.reddit.com/ would be Reddit's old mobile site.
    - skavi 6y ago
      that’s really quite nice actually. Definitely feels much faster than the current mobile site. If only because it doesn’t have the app pop-up.
    - dublinben 6y ago
      Their original mobile site (now inaccessible) from more than ten years ago was even more minimal. The original m.reddit.com was replaced with the compact version (i.reddit.com) you've linked, and subsequently replaced by their awful current mobile site. https://web.archive.org/web/20090116041704/http://m.reddit.com/ https://web.archive.org/web/20090116041704/http://m.reddit.c...
      - jtvjan 6y ago
        Still accessible here: https://www.reddit.com/.mobile https://www.reddit.com/.mobile
- rozab 6y ago
  Unfortunately I can't see the results, and it's not working on archive.org either. What exactly does time-to-interactive mean? On my actual mobile (firefox with ublock), new reddit takes about 6-7 seconds to load in the actual content. On clean desktop chrome it takes 2-3 seconds, and on chrome pretending to be a mobile it takes 4 seconds (!). Old reddit takes less than a second. It seems like the metrics here just have no bearing on reality.
- 7952 6y ago
  I think that I blame the website for being slow when I see a Javascript loading screen. But when the browser is just waiting I blame the slowness of the connection. Maybe, that is why the speeds feel so different even if they are quite similar.
- JohnBooty 6y ago
  old Reddit actually has a worse time-to-interactive score It's an interesting example of a good metric that is perhaps not the right metric for a particular application. For many/most users, I'm sure Reddit usage is something like 95% reading / 5% "interaction", or perhaps even closer to a 100/0 split. So "time until I can actually read what I clicked on" is probably the right primary user satisfaction metric...
- whywhywhywhy 6y ago
  This makes me question the whole test. Anyone can see the opposite is true in actual use and can feel even high end machines choke loading new Reddit.
aww_dang 6y ago
Further crimes were visible in the passed tests. >Avoids enormous network payloads Total size was 1,438 KiB I don't agree that >1mb is an appropriate size for a webpage.
reallymental 6y ago
- Avoid an excessive DOM size: 1658 elements. That's insane.
- azemetre 6y ago
  I can easily see how people fall into these traps. At my company we use styled-components for our styling library with react. Someone on the team made a few reusable components that styled the text correctly to what design wants (correct font, size, color, and all the typography goodies), you could even specify what element you wanted (p, span, h1-h6, etc) and it would base the styles of that for you. It was basically this: <Text type='paragraph' fontWeight='bold'>Some nicely styled letters</Text> After a few months of using these components are product got noticeably slower, and on certain pages it completely broke accessibility. After doing some digging, one (out of many) issues that hurt our performance was the needless HTML. Our link elements had nested span or p tags. Headings has span tags, buttons had span tags. Basically every interactive element had potentially 3-4 redundant tags. Our navigation bar, which has 4 links (no sub-navigation), was 100+ DOM nodes. Wildly inefficient. And this was a small section of the overall page, imagine something like a table displaying data with tabular elements. That alone can easily be 600-1500 elements. We didn't need to use a span tag to style text in a button element. We didn't need a paragraph tag to style text inside an anchor. But that's what we did. Our code basically looked like this: <CustomButton onClick={props.buttonChange}><Text type='span'>{props.text}</Text></Button> The above would be abstracted as another component and it would look innocuous as: <RefreshButton onClick={customEvent} text={refreshCopy} /> But this button would be comprised of so much DOM elements, you wouldn't have any idea unless you are constantly inspecting what everyone is doing (which is full time work itself, that some people don't want to do). How it hurt accessibility was that some screen readers (and potentially other assistive tech) can't parse large DOM trees, and the use case for these people simply wouldn't work (they couldn't traverse the page at all). This may be a limitation of how the device interacted with the accessibility tree and the DOM tree, but the failures are significant. Choosing certain tools can force you to go down a certain path and I'm still floored why we couldn't just use CSS and not rely on making multiple divs to customize certain components and just using css appropriately to style the text (rather than relying on text components). I'd estimate that we could probably get rid of 30-60% of some of our frontend code (styling and jsx) if we just used appropriate classes for our styles.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
tyingq 6y ago
Same 41 score as m.youtube.com.
davweb 6y ago
I wouldn't read too much into this. There's obviously some good tips you can get about your site performance from here, but Google's Page Speed Insights are about making a site a good search result which isn't the same as a good website overall. If you only target the PageSpeed score you'll optimise for loading a page quickly when linked from Google. This then allows users to easily click back and forth between Google search results and different sites. This may not be the users you should be primarily optimising for. For example, if you have larger JavaScript bundles you will get penalised in PageSpeed, even if for most of your users this will overall be a benefit. If you care about your page ranking you do have to care about this score as it is an input to that, but it is not an unbiased view of overall site performance.
RavlaAlvar 6y ago
The new Reddit page experience is really horrible. Speed slow for every action and extremely laggy. Your would think single page application is faster once all the resources are loaded from the server, but no. I started to think they purposely make the experience worse to push user to their mobile app.
- pixxel 6y ago
  > I started to think they purposely make the experience worse to push user to their mobile app. It’s been awful for so long that this has to be the reason. The constant nags to use the app support this. I don’t use reddit much these days but I noticed subreddits are now locked behind logins?! Since I long ago deleted my account I now switch to old.reddit.com to view. Desktop view on mobile but subreddits are “unlocked”.
- PaulKeeble 6y ago
  It is probably about ads. You can't block ads as easily in a custom application verses the browser. So nudging strongly your customers to it will improve ad impressions and likely revenue.
drcongo 6y ago
Scores are much more readable on GTMetrix, new Reddit [0] has an astonishing 25.8s load time and 15.8MB page weight. Old Reddit [1] manages 6.4s and 2.36MB. Single page apps can get in the sea. [0] https://gtmetrix.com/reports/www.reddit.com/Q5D9H3kv https://gtmetrix.com/reports/www.reddit.com/Q5D9H3kv [1] https://gtmetrix.com/reports/old.reddit.com/rggtP5kg https://gtmetrix.com/reports/old.reddit.com/rggtP5kg

18 points by taspeotis 6y ago

good, looks bad

css 6y ago

Old Reddit only 8 points better: https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fold.reddit.com%2F&tab=mobile https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/?url=... In fact, old Reddit actually has a worse time-to-interactive score and a lot more DOM elements: 1.6k for new Reddit and 2.3k for old.

ancarda 6y ago
If you click on the desktop tab, you'll see new Reddit is 48 whereas old Reddit is 80 - a massive improvement I think old Reddit not being mobile friendly is a big reason why its score is so low
- threatofrain 6y ago
  https://i.reddit.com/ https://i.reddit.com/ would be Reddit's old mobile site.
  - skavi 6y ago
    that’s really quite nice actually. Definitely feels much faster than the current mobile site. If only because it doesn’t have the app pop-up.
  - dublinben 6y ago
    Their original mobile site (now inaccessible) from more than ten years ago was even more minimal. The original m.reddit.com was replaced with the compact version (i.reddit.com) you've linked, and subsequently replaced by their awful current mobile site. https://web.archive.org/web/20090116041704/http://m.reddit.com/ https://web.archive.org/web/20090116041704/http://m.reddit.c...
    - jtvjan 6y ago
      Still accessible here: https://www.reddit.com/.mobile https://www.reddit.com/.mobile
rozab 6y ago
Unfortunately I can't see the results, and it's not working on archive.org either. What exactly does time-to-interactive mean? On my actual mobile (firefox with ublock), new reddit takes about 6-7 seconds to load in the actual content. On clean desktop chrome it takes 2-3 seconds, and on chrome pretending to be a mobile it takes 4 seconds (!). Old reddit takes less than a second. It seems like the metrics here just have no bearing on reality.
7952 6y ago
I think that I blame the website for being slow when I see a Javascript loading screen. But when the browser is just waiting I blame the slowness of the connection. Maybe, that is why the speeds feel so different even if they are quite similar.
JohnBooty 6y ago
old Reddit actually has a worse time-to-interactive score It's an interesting example of a good metric that is perhaps not the right metric for a particular application. For many/most users, I'm sure Reddit usage is something like 95% reading / 5% "interaction", or perhaps even closer to a 100/0 split. So "time until I can actually read what I clicked on" is probably the right primary user satisfaction metric...
whywhywhywhy 6y ago
This makes me question the whole test. Anyone can see the opposite is true in actual use and can feel even high end machines choke loading new Reddit.

aww_dang 6y ago

Further crimes were visible in the passed tests. >Avoids enormous network payloads Total size was 1,438 KiB I don't agree that >1mb is an appropriate size for a webpage.

reallymental 6y ago

- Avoid an excessive DOM size: 1658 elements. That's insane.

azemetre 6y ago
I can easily see how people fall into these traps. At my company we use styled-components for our styling library with react. Someone on the team made a few reusable components that styled the text correctly to what design wants (correct font, size, color, and all the typography goodies), you could even specify what element you wanted (p, span, h1-h6, etc) and it would base the styles of that for you. It was basically this: <Text type='paragraph' fontWeight='bold'>Some nicely styled letters</Text> After a few months of using these components are product got noticeably slower, and on certain pages it completely broke accessibility. After doing some digging, one (out of many) issues that hurt our performance was the needless HTML. Our link elements had nested span or p tags. Headings has span tags, buttons had span tags. Basically every interactive element had potentially 3-4 redundant tags. Our navigation bar, which has 4 links (no sub-navigation), was 100+ DOM nodes. Wildly inefficient. And this was a small section of the overall page, imagine something like a table displaying data with tabular elements. That alone can easily be 600-1500 elements. We didn't need to use a span tag to style text in a button element. We didn't need a paragraph tag to style text inside an anchor. But that's what we did. Our code basically looked like this: <CustomButton onClick={props.buttonChange}><Text type='span'>{props.text}</Text></Button> The above would be abstracted as another component and it would look innocuous as: <RefreshButton onClick={customEvent} text={refreshCopy} /> But this button would be comprised of so much DOM elements, you wouldn't have any idea unless you are constantly inspecting what everyone is doing (which is full time work itself, that some people don't want to do). How it hurt accessibility was that some screen readers (and potentially other assistive tech) can't parse large DOM trees, and the use case for these people simply wouldn't work (they couldn't traverse the page at all). This may be a limitation of how the device interacted with the accessibility tree and the DOM tree, but the failures are significant. Choosing certain tools can force you to go down a certain path and I'm still floored why we couldn't just use CSS and not rely on making multiple divs to customize certain components and just using css appropriately to style the text (rather than relying on text components). I'd estimate that we could probably get rid of 30-60% of some of our frontend code (styling and jsx) if we just used appropriate classes for our styles.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

tyingq 6y ago

Same 41 score as m.youtube.com.

davweb 6y ago

I wouldn't read too much into this. There's obviously some good tips you can get about your site performance from here, but Google's Page Speed Insights are about making a site a good search result which isn't the same as a good website overall. If you only target the PageSpeed score you'll optimise for loading a page quickly when linked from Google. This then allows users to easily click back and forth between Google search results and different sites. This may not be the users you should be primarily optimising for. For example, if you have larger JavaScript bundles you will get penalised in PageSpeed, even if for most of your users this will overall be a benefit. If you care about your page ranking you do have to care about this score as it is an input to that, but it is not an unbiased view of overall site performance.

RavlaAlvar 6y ago

The new Reddit page experience is really horrible. Speed slow for every action and extremely laggy. Your would think single page application is faster once all the resources are loaded from the server, but no. I started to think they purposely make the experience worse to push user to their mobile app.

pixxel 6y ago
> I started to think they purposely make the experience worse to push user to their mobile app. It’s been awful for so long that this has to be the reason. The constant nags to use the app support this. I don’t use reddit much these days but I noticed subreddits are now locked behind logins?! Since I long ago deleted my account I now switch to old.reddit.com to view. Desktop view on mobile but subreddits are “unlocked”.
PaulKeeble 6y ago
It is probably about ads. You can't block ads as easily in a custom application verses the browser. So nudging strongly your customers to it will improve ad impressions and likely revenue.

drcongo 6y ago

Scores are much more readable on GTMetrix, new Reddit [0] has an astonishing 25.8s load time and 15.8MB page weight. Old Reddit [1] manages 6.4s and 2.36MB. Single page apps can get in the sea. [0] https://gtmetrix.com/reports/www.reddit.com/Q5D9H3kv https://gtmetrix.com/reports/www.reddit.com/Q5D9H3kv [1] https://gtmetrix.com/reports/old.reddit.com/rggtP5kg https://gtmetrix.com/reports/old.reddit.com/rggtP5kg