8 ms·

Yeah, but in reality most news sites will fail Core Web Vitals in their current state. Out of 71 tracked articles on news sites, only 3 or 4 score 85 or higher

Yeah, but in reality most news sites will fail Core Web Vitals in their current state. Out of 71 tracked articles on news sites, only 3 or 4 score 85 or higher in overall Performance as tested by Google Lighthouse. Article Performance Leaderboard: https://webperf.xyz/ https://webperf.xyz/

notatoad 5y ago
good the amp detractors have always said that we don't need amp because authors can just make their websites faster instead. here's the chance to see whether or not that's true. news organizations have generally terrible performance and deserve to be punished for it in search rankings.
- jeffbee 5y ago
  Most of the junk at the bottom of the list combines hostile web development practices with criminal negligence of good journalism. If nobody ever visits sfgate.com again, that will be a benefit to humanity.
- topicseed 5y ago
  It is very true! Giants might move slower (as always) but most ad-powered websites have been working like headless chicken to get these metrics in the green. Granted, it's hard so some may be satisfied with orange metrics. But I've seen on all publisher-friendly communities I am in how much of an Earthquake the CWV Google Update has been, even if it is now pushed back. Let's hope more and more follow that trend because nobody hate a fast-loading site with good content!
  - nindalf 5y ago
    > even if it is now pushed back It was pushed back by 6 months, but it's live now.
    - topicseed 5y ago
      I meant to say Google using CWV as a ranking signal being pushed back, apologies.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- agogdog 5y ago
  They won't be punished because relevance is still vastly more important. A news startup isn't going to eat the New York Times' lunch by beating them with performance. Maybe you'll see a little competition at the top, but I'm skeptical... there's not much incentive to do so.
- watwut 5y ago
  I personally hated amp, because then I got version of page without dark mode and with limited content instead of real one. I am actually fine waiting 200ms longer to get those.
  - dheera 5y ago
    It was often 10000ms for me, and there would be popups and paywalls that AMP circumvents.
    - missblit 5y ago
      AMP actually supports paywalls: https://amp.dev/documentation/components/amp-access/ https://amp.dev/documentation/components/amp-access/ This extension is also actually kinda interesting in that it embeds a small domain specific language [1] that's interpreted with a lex-style parser in JavaScript. This can itself be a bit heavy on the CPU if a website uses it too judiciously! [1] https://github.com/ampproject/amphtml/blob/main/extensions/amp-access/0.1/access-expr-impl.jison https://github.com/ampproject/amphtml/blob/main/extensions/a...
    - goodcanadian 5y ago
      It's fascinating to me as I moved away from Chrome on mobile specifically because amp caused me so many problems. The solution to page load failures was always editing the URL to give me the original which worked so much better. Hear that Google? The experience was so bad that I changed browsers to avoid it.
- baybal2 5y ago
  A simpler explanation. Google will eventually ban any big enough ad vendor tinkering too much with delayed loading. They, obviously, cannot ban themselves.
  - filoleg 5y ago
    >Google will eventually ban any big enough ad vendor tinkering too much with delayed loading. Delayed/deferred loading is supposed to improve page performance metrics, not degrade them. In light of this, I fail to see how you arrive at this conclusion after an article that essentially says that Google decided to de-prioritize AMP in search results and instead give top spots to well-performing websites regardless of whether they are AMP or not. If anything, this move encourages delayed/deferred loading for all non-AMP websites, because that's one way to improve your website performance and get your search ranking higher.
    - baybal2 5y ago
      I my experience google habitually bans just anything seemingly tinkering with ad loading code
- bryanrasmussen 5y ago
  >news organizations have generally terrible performance and deserve to be punished for it in search rankings. I wonder how this affects that Australian law about having to tell news sites about algorithm changes, etc. or maybe is affected by.
  - lrem 5y ago
    Is that law in? Being a Googler I kind of can't imagine search working well under it. Would be an absolute spamfest.
    - ehnto 5y ago
      It is in place I believe, Google made some concessions and workarounds. https://www.legislation.gov.au/Details/C2021A00021 https://www.legislation.gov.au/Details/C2021A00021 https://about.google/google-in-australia/an-open-letter/ https://about.google/google-in-australia/an-open-letter/ Everyone loses, frankly. It was one monopoly versus another, and the Australian people were never a concern.
      - lrem 5y ago
        That reads as "we agreed to send some money", not "we agreed to delay ranking changes by 4 weeks". The latter is the interesting part, as it is incompatible with the reality of needing thousands of algorithm updates per year. Edit: ah, there's now a provision for this: > (ii) if the change relates to a matter of urgent public interest—no later than 48 hours after the change is made; and
- thatwasunusual 5y ago
  > news organizations have generally terrible performance and deserve to be punished for it in search rankings. Shouldn't the quality of a site's _content_ count more than its performance?
  - betenoire 5y ago
    All else equal, it should. Delivery matters too though, since inaccessible content isn't really useful content
  - ehsankia 5y ago
    Obviously Google search isn't going to give you an article about Oranges when you query for Apples, but when there's a ton of articles about Apples, having a website with better performance will rank higher. It's unclear how the knobs are tuned, Google's ranking algorithm definitely has a lot to it. All that is a bit irrelevant, this whole thing is about the news carousel specifically, which is basically showing a bunch of articles in a carousel at the top of search results. Previously only AMP articles showed, now I'm guessing you need some minimum threshold of performance. Seems reasonable, you don't want really slow pages that would push away users.
- ehnto 5y ago
  With AMP they just offload their concerns to Google, and I assume they will stay doing that. They have no alternative to their ridiculous ad-tech burderns so I can't see it changing. But who this does help is websites who are capable of producing a fast experience and don't rely on a dozen ad-tech companies snippets, which will tend to be the smaller sites.
  - donohoe 5y ago
    There is still an incentive for publishers. AMP typically showed lower CPMs on ads, and it is possible to have faster loading pages than AMP with ads. Just look at DotDash and their range of verticals.
- some_random 5y ago
  As much as I hate AMP (well, google specifically), you're right. News orgs will never, ever fix their heavy ass webpages unless they're forced to.
- disabled 5y ago
  > news organizations have generally terrible performance and deserve to be punished for it in search rankings. Most news on the internet is plagiarized off of a few original sources at best and then redistributed on various sites and portals. This is a devastating problem for a democratic society. For example, local reporting in the United States has been eroded to the extreme. When a society does not have a commitment to factuality, people become more susceptible to fake news (propaganda), conspiracy theories (such as QAnon), and tend to become more uneducated. Yes, it is true, education can be very easily undone, including in highly intelligent, well-educated individuals. Facts do not come naturally, nor do they come out of “progress”, such as technological progress. Factuality requires hard work and a lot of money, and it requires reporters on the ground, including in foreign places, such as in the case of foreign correspondents. Unfortunately, the use of foreign correspondents for American news services, physically on the ground in foreign lands, has almost been completely eliminated. The lack of foreign correspondents means that when a crisis abroad occurs, Americans often have to fill in the gaps and infer what is going on. This allows bad actors to take control. Of course people do not like to hear the facts. They are hard to listen to and believe in, but they are healthy, especially for a democratic and free society. Of course they are healthy for you as an individual. The Financial Times has excellent reporting with foreign correspondents located in various countries across the world. The Financial Times also has great tech reporting. In the 8 years that I have been a subscriber, I have only found myself disappointed while reading one single article reporting on tech. Also, of course, I subscribe to local newspapers too.
fenomas 5y ago
How is that data compiled? Just poking around, the worst site in the list (SFGate) seems to have gotten a "1" for performance every time it's been tested, but when I try checking the same link in lighthouse (mobile mode) it scores 55~60.
- topicseed 5y ago
  CWV metrics are gathered and aggregated from field data with the variety of devices and internet speeds you would expect in the wild.
  - fenomas 5y ago
    I was asking about the lighthouse results in the link in GP's post, is that what you're answering?
    - topicseed 5y ago
      Oh, my bad! Last time I checked, Lighthouse in Chromium used (by default) a Moto G4 on a mobile network simulation.
- donohoe 5y ago
  Uses Google Lighthouse. Takes average of last 3 days worth of tests. Each site usually tested 1-2 times per day. All the data is here: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1sGKmbnW74u9r1GOzAQcIl3tAdLPLQ7ZkDMK2uR2HYfA/edit#gid=1647776330 https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1sGKmbnW74u9r1GOzAQcI...
  - fenomas 5y ago
    That's the data I asked about. That data shows SFGate repeatedly getting a 1, but when I try the same test it gets 55-60?
    - p49k 5y ago
      There is no one lighthouse number. The site is likely using their own scores that are based on (but not direct averages of) lighthouse. Perhaps they give a score of 1 to the lowest site and scale up.
littlestymaar 5y ago
But despite its name, AMP isn't much help to improve your website's speed though, for instance the new Reddit website uses APM and isn't faster[1] than the old one by lighthouse's metric (and I find it significantly slower from a user's perspective). Semi-unrelated trivia: Google lighthouse's own website is a disaster[3] by their own standards (with a score of 28), which I find pretty ironic. [1]: https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.reddit.com%2Fr%2Fprogramming https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/?url=... [2]: https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fold.reddit.com%2Fr%2Fprogramming https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/?url=... [3]: https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fdevelopers.google.com%2Fweb%2Ftools%2Flighthouse%2F https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/?url=...
- SquareWheel 5y ago
  > for instance the new Reddit website uses APM and isn't faster than the old one by lighthouse's metric The AMP page will still load faster because it conforms to a spec which is known to be preload-safe. This means it can be served by services like search engines without any additional network activity, and with minimal layout calculations needed. Ultimately that's what AMP was designed for. It's more than just a head-to-head speed comparison. As a sidenote though, reddit's AMP implementation is horrendous for a dozen reasons. It's almost impossible to escape loading the real site, which is not at all within AMP's design guidelines.
  - dmitriid 5y ago
    > preload-safe. > served by services like search engines without any additional network activity You mean AMP pages egt preferntial treatment by Google, and all AMP-related Javascript (IIRC, almost 1 MB of it) is loaded the moment you search anything through Google. When you hit an AMP page, that JS is already preloaded and, true, there's "no additional network activity". I'd love for Google to serve my pages' Javascript as well when I search something, and get preferencial treatment, but alas.
    - 5y ago
chrisacky 5y ago
Is the suite that you use to manage these tests available on a git repo by chance? I really like how transparent you've made: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1sGKmbnW74u9r1GOzAQcIl3tAdLPLQ7ZkDMK2uR2HYfA/edit#gid=806206891 https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1sGKmbnW74u9r1GOzAQcI... And I wanted to run something similar but for our own network of sites. (If so you can reach me on my email in profile). Have about 400 sites to access.
partiallypro 5y ago
Or just Google's own products/services. They usually fail. Same with Apple, Microsoft, everyone. I don't like the "Core Web Vital" metric because it is possible to make your site load slower or in a non-pleasing way for users and improve your score.
mfontani 5y ago
Would it be possible to add tech news sites to the list? I see you've the onion, but no engadget or ElReg.

notatoad 5y ago

good the amp detractors have always said that we don't need amp because authors can just make their websites faster instead. here's the chance to see whether or not that's true. news organizations have generally terrible performance and deserve to be punished for it in search rankings.

jeffbee 5y ago
Most of the junk at the bottom of the list combines hostile web development practices with criminal negligence of good journalism. If nobody ever visits sfgate.com again, that will be a benefit to humanity.
topicseed 5y ago
It is very true! Giants might move slower (as always) but most ad-powered websites have been working like headless chicken to get these metrics in the green. Granted, it's hard so some may be satisfied with orange metrics. But I've seen on all publisher-friendly communities I am in how much of an Earthquake the CWV Google Update has been, even if it is now pushed back. Let's hope more and more follow that trend because nobody hate a fast-loading site with good content!
- nindalf 5y ago
  > even if it is now pushed back It was pushed back by 6 months, but it's live now.
  - topicseed 5y ago
    I meant to say Google using CWV as a ranking signal being pushed back, apologies.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
agogdog 5y ago
They won't be punished because relevance is still vastly more important. A news startup isn't going to eat the New York Times' lunch by beating them with performance. Maybe you'll see a little competition at the top, but I'm skeptical... there's not much incentive to do so.
watwut 5y ago
I personally hated amp, because then I got version of page without dark mode and with limited content instead of real one. I am actually fine waiting 200ms longer to get those.
- dheera 5y ago
  It was often 10000ms for me, and there would be popups and paywalls that AMP circumvents.
  - missblit 5y ago
    AMP actually supports paywalls: https://amp.dev/documentation/components/amp-access/ https://amp.dev/documentation/components/amp-access/ This extension is also actually kinda interesting in that it embeds a small domain specific language [1] that's interpreted with a lex-style parser in JavaScript. This can itself be a bit heavy on the CPU if a website uses it too judiciously! [1] https://github.com/ampproject/amphtml/blob/main/extensions/amp-access/0.1/access-expr-impl.jison https://github.com/ampproject/amphtml/blob/main/extensions/a...
  - goodcanadian 5y ago
    It's fascinating to me as I moved away from Chrome on mobile specifically because amp caused me so many problems. The solution to page load failures was always editing the URL to give me the original which worked so much better. Hear that Google? The experience was so bad that I changed browsers to avoid it.
baybal2 5y ago
A simpler explanation. Google will eventually ban any big enough ad vendor tinkering too much with delayed loading. They, obviously, cannot ban themselves.
- filoleg 5y ago
  >Google will eventually ban any big enough ad vendor tinkering too much with delayed loading. Delayed/deferred loading is supposed to improve page performance metrics, not degrade them. In light of this, I fail to see how you arrive at this conclusion after an article that essentially says that Google decided to de-prioritize AMP in search results and instead give top spots to well-performing websites regardless of whether they are AMP or not. If anything, this move encourages delayed/deferred loading for all non-AMP websites, because that's one way to improve your website performance and get your search ranking higher.
  - baybal2 5y ago
    I my experience google habitually bans just anything seemingly tinkering with ad loading code
bryanrasmussen 5y ago
>news organizations have generally terrible performance and deserve to be punished for it in search rankings. I wonder how this affects that Australian law about having to tell news sites about algorithm changes, etc. or maybe is affected by.
- lrem 5y ago
  Is that law in? Being a Googler I kind of can't imagine search working well under it. Would be an absolute spamfest.
  - ehnto 5y ago
    It is in place I believe, Google made some concessions and workarounds. https://www.legislation.gov.au/Details/C2021A00021 https://www.legislation.gov.au/Details/C2021A00021 https://about.google/google-in-australia/an-open-letter/ https://about.google/google-in-australia/an-open-letter/ Everyone loses, frankly. It was one monopoly versus another, and the Australian people were never a concern.
    - lrem 5y ago
      That reads as "we agreed to send some money", not "we agreed to delay ranking changes by 4 weeks". The latter is the interesting part, as it is incompatible with the reality of needing thousands of algorithm updates per year. Edit: ah, there's now a provision for this: > (ii) if the change relates to a matter of urgent public interest—no later than 48 hours after the change is made; and
thatwasunusual 5y ago
> news organizations have generally terrible performance and deserve to be punished for it in search rankings. Shouldn't the quality of a site's _content_ count more than its performance?
- betenoire 5y ago
  All else equal, it should. Delivery matters too though, since inaccessible content isn't really useful content
- ehsankia 5y ago
  Obviously Google search isn't going to give you an article about Oranges when you query for Apples, but when there's a ton of articles about Apples, having a website with better performance will rank higher. It's unclear how the knobs are tuned, Google's ranking algorithm definitely has a lot to it. All that is a bit irrelevant, this whole thing is about the news carousel specifically, which is basically showing a bunch of articles in a carousel at the top of search results. Previously only AMP articles showed, now I'm guessing you need some minimum threshold of performance. Seems reasonable, you don't want really slow pages that would push away users.
ehnto 5y ago
With AMP they just offload their concerns to Google, and I assume they will stay doing that. They have no alternative to their ridiculous ad-tech burderns so I can't see it changing. But who this does help is websites who are capable of producing a fast experience and don't rely on a dozen ad-tech companies snippets, which will tend to be the smaller sites.
- donohoe 5y ago
  There is still an incentive for publishers. AMP typically showed lower CPMs on ads, and it is possible to have faster loading pages than AMP with ads. Just look at DotDash and their range of verticals.
some_random 5y ago
As much as I hate AMP (well, google specifically), you're right. News orgs will never, ever fix their heavy ass webpages unless they're forced to.
disabled 5y ago
> news organizations have generally terrible performance and deserve to be punished for it in search rankings. Most news on the internet is plagiarized off of a few original sources at best and then redistributed on various sites and portals. This is a devastating problem for a democratic society. For example, local reporting in the United States has been eroded to the extreme. When a society does not have a commitment to factuality, people become more susceptible to fake news (propaganda), conspiracy theories (such as QAnon), and tend to become more uneducated. Yes, it is true, education can be very easily undone, including in highly intelligent, well-educated individuals. Facts do not come naturally, nor do they come out of “progress”, such as technological progress. Factuality requires hard work and a lot of money, and it requires reporters on the ground, including in foreign places, such as in the case of foreign correspondents. Unfortunately, the use of foreign correspondents for American news services, physically on the ground in foreign lands, has almost been completely eliminated. The lack of foreign correspondents means that when a crisis abroad occurs, Americans often have to fill in the gaps and infer what is going on. This allows bad actors to take control. Of course people do not like to hear the facts. They are hard to listen to and believe in, but they are healthy, especially for a democratic and free society. Of course they are healthy for you as an individual. The Financial Times has excellent reporting with foreign correspondents located in various countries across the world. The Financial Times also has great tech reporting. In the 8 years that I have been a subscriber, I have only found myself disappointed while reading one single article reporting on tech. Also, of course, I subscribe to local newspapers too.

fenomas 5y ago

How is that data compiled? Just poking around, the worst site in the list (SFGate) seems to have gotten a "1" for performance every time it's been tested, but when I try checking the same link in lighthouse (mobile mode) it scores 55~60.

topicseed 5y ago
CWV metrics are gathered and aggregated from field data with the variety of devices and internet speeds you would expect in the wild.
- fenomas 5y ago
  I was asking about the lighthouse results in the link in GP's post, is that what you're answering?
  - topicseed 5y ago
    Oh, my bad! Last time I checked, Lighthouse in Chromium used (by default) a Moto G4 on a mobile network simulation.
donohoe 5y ago
Uses Google Lighthouse. Takes average of last 3 days worth of tests. Each site usually tested 1-2 times per day. All the data is here: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1sGKmbnW74u9r1GOzAQcIl3tAdLPLQ7ZkDMK2uR2HYfA/edit#gid=1647776330 https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1sGKmbnW74u9r1GOzAQcI...
- fenomas 5y ago
  That's the data I asked about. That data shows SFGate repeatedly getting a 1, but when I try the same test it gets 55-60?
  - p49k 5y ago
    There is no one lighthouse number. The site is likely using their own scores that are based on (but not direct averages of) lighthouse. Perhaps they give a score of 1 to the lowest site and scale up.

littlestymaar 5y ago

But despite its name, AMP isn't much help to improve your website's speed though, for instance the new Reddit website uses APM and isn't faster[1] than the old one by lighthouse's metric (and I find it significantly slower from a user's perspective). Semi-unrelated trivia: Google lighthouse's own website is a disaster[3] by their own standards (with a score of 28), which I find pretty ironic. [1]: https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.reddit.com%2Fr%2Fprogramming https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/?url=... [2]: https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fold.reddit.com%2Fr%2Fprogramming https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/?url=... [3]: https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fdevelopers.google.com%2Fweb%2Ftools%2Flighthouse%2F https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/?url=...

SquareWheel 5y ago
> for instance the new Reddit website uses APM and isn't faster than the old one by lighthouse's metric The AMP page will still load faster because it conforms to a spec which is known to be preload-safe. This means it can be served by services like search engines without any additional network activity, and with minimal layout calculations needed. Ultimately that's what AMP was designed for. It's more than just a head-to-head speed comparison. As a sidenote though, reddit's AMP implementation is horrendous for a dozen reasons. It's almost impossible to escape loading the real site, which is not at all within AMP's design guidelines.
- dmitriid 5y ago
  > preload-safe. > served by services like search engines without any additional network activity You mean AMP pages egt preferntial treatment by Google, and all AMP-related Javascript (IIRC, almost 1 MB of it) is loaded the moment you search anything through Google. When you hit an AMP page, that JS is already preloaded and, true, there's "no additional network activity". I'd love for Google to serve my pages' Javascript as well when I search something, and get preferencial treatment, but alas.
  - 5y ago

chrisacky 5y ago

Is the suite that you use to manage these tests available on a git repo by chance? I really like how transparent you've made: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1sGKmbnW74u9r1GOzAQcIl3tAdLPLQ7ZkDMK2uR2HYfA/edit#gid=806206891 https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1sGKmbnW74u9r1GOzAQcI... And I wanted to run something similar but for our own network of sites. (If so you can reach me on my email in profile). Have about 400 sites to access.

partiallypro 5y ago

Or just Google's own products/services. They usually fail. Same with Apple, Microsoft, everyone. I don't like the "Core Web Vital" metric because it is possible to make your site load slower or in a non-pleasing way for users and improve your score.

mfontani 5y ago

Would it be possible to add tech news sites to the list? I see you've the onion, but no engadget or ElReg.