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Show HN: I ranked news websites by speed

• gravypod 4y ago
  Odd to see CNN last when https://lite.cnn.com/en https://lite.cnn.com/en exists. Maybe that should be another entry?
  • enlyth 4y ago
    For some reason these just look unreadable to me, a huge wall of text and just too much information thrown at me at once from all sorts of random topics that I may or may not care about. I actually really enjoy the newspaper style visual layout, even if they use stock photos. It makes it easier to navigate with my mind. The ads and bloat can all be solved by installing an ad blocker.
    • axg11 4y ago
      You're not wrong. This is how the internet used to look like. Modern web layouts and designs evolved to be this way because they result in higher engagement metrics.
      • drewzero1 4y ago
        There's also the fact that screens have gotten so much bigger since the early web. A wall of text didn't look as much like a wall when it was in a 640x480 window. (Minus a couple of banner ads, of course!)
      • hombre_fatal 4y ago
        Well, higher engagement metrics seems like a cynical way to say "more readable" especially given the parent comment's complaint. You don't need commercial interests to think about UX. The early web looked the way it did mostly due to hobbyism and undeveloped UX standards that we take for granted today.
        • axg11 4y ago
          I didn’t intend to use engagement metrics in a negative way. We also have to note that the audience has changed. The audience of the early web was very different to the average audience today (almost everyone).
  • bradgessler 4y ago
    I thought about including the "lite" websites, but decided against it since those are not the primary news reading experiences that they're pushing. What I might do is add a link to any news website that has a lite/text-only website. I'll go ahead and say that yes, this is somewhat self-serving, but I'm hoping this puts pressure on some news websites to get their act together and make their primary news websites faster for everybody. --- Edit: I've pushed out the updates 1. Individual speed reports now include a link to the text-only sites. 2. Methodology makes a mention of it at https://legiblenews.com/speed/methodology https://legiblenews.com/speed/methodology (I still need to refine it; wrote and published in haste)
    • synu 4y ago
      Why don’t the lite versions count? They are what I use on mobile for primary reading. If the goal is pressuring sites that are too slow you should reward the ones that are quick.
      • TylerE 4y ago
        The goal is clearly self-promotion, and not neutral observation.
    • LeoPanthera 4y ago
      This is crazy. You made a lightweight, text-only news site, but then refuse to compare it to the other lightweight, text-only news sites. As well as CNN, NPR has one too: https://text.npr.org https://text.npr.org There's also http://68k.news http://68k.news which is particularly nice because it hyperlinks to images in the stories rather than embedding them.
      • WA9ACE 4y ago
        Tangentially https://lite.pbs.org/ https://lite.pbs.org/ also launched this year.
      • Induane 4y ago
        I came here to point out the existence of text.npr.org but it seems I'm way too late!
  • april_22 4y ago
    Didn't know https://lite.cnn.com/en https://lite.cnn.com/en exists Looks very clean, thanks for this
  • metadaemon 4y ago
    Got a 96 for me: https://pagespeed.web.dev/report?url=https%3A%2F%2Flite.cnn.com%2Fen https://pagespeed.web.dev/report?url=https%3A%2F%2Flite.cnn.... Oddly enough legible news only got an 86: https://pagespeed.web.dev/report?url=https%3A%2F%2Flegiblenews.com%2F https://pagespeed.web.dev/report?url=https%3A%2F%2Flegiblene...
    • metadaemon 4y ago
      Oops that was on the Mobile tab. Both score 100 on Desktop.
    • bradgessler 4y ago
      Yeah speed varies depending on time of day and whether or not your Heroku instances are being subjected to an influx of HN traffic. :-) Cranking up the Dynos to keep up. Which BTW, that's the funny thing, Heroku is super duper slow, and I still manage to run a reasonable fast news website. Here's response times under HN load: https://s3.amazonaws.com/bradgessler/Eu1cKE24dpKjTkqNcK3qPqH3mwwXirAlOJiZXN9Sd4nSOdWtU4N6Ir3NB96h0WGkXo3NzEghEzUl8dYOOwSgFhcRQlXMuy6WfruS.png https://s3.amazonaws.com/bradgessler/Eu1cKE24dpKjTkqNcK3qPqH... 99th percentile is at 175ms.
      • turtlebits 4y ago
        If your page is only updated once a day, why not render a static html site and put it on a host like netlify?
        • encryptluks2 4y ago
          This. There is no need for a cloud server. Even better get a 10GB port private server from Interserver and stop using Heroku.
          • busymom0 4y ago
            Hadn’t heard of Interserver before. How are they?
  • jwilk 4y ago
    It's annoying the the lite.cnn.com URLs look nothing like the normal ones, e.g.: https://edition.cnn.com/2022/06/28/entertainment/tom-hanks-forrest-gump-interview-intl-scli/index.html https://edition.cnn.com/2022/06/28/entertainment/tom-hanks-f... https://lite.cnn.com/en/article/h_fdb58e07457b1cd96266160502456b5c https://lite.cnn.com/en/article/h_fdb58e07457b1cd96266160502... Does anyone know how to automatically map one to the other?
    • stuross 4y ago
      you can't connect that two at the moment. Though there will be an update soon to use the same slug as www.cnn.com
  • yashap 4y ago
    Also, I will say that the normal CNN site is slow to completely load, but decently fast to become interactive. Like on my iPhone, everything above the fold is loaded and interactive reasonably quickly, even if the little blue loader bar does take quite awhile to finish. But if you’re not focusing on that, the site doesn’t FEEL slow, as the key content you want to start reading right away does load decently fast.
• twobitshifter 4y ago
  in addition to lite.cnn.com please add text.npr.org
  • bradgessler 4y ago
    I linked to it at https://legiblenews.com/speed/websites/npr https://legiblenews.com/speed/websites/npr CNN too at https://legiblenews.com/speed/websites/cnn https://legiblenews.com/speed/websites/cnn
• metadaemon 4y ago
  You might be able to squeeze out some more speed with Brotli and enabling http/2 on Cowboy.
• ARandomerDude 4y ago
  Interesting. Honestly, I never notice load times from news sites because they're all an advertising cesspool and I run Brave + layered ad blockers on my computer and mobile devices. As a point of curiosity I wonder how these sites would compare with ad blocking enabled. But at the end of the day I care a lot more about their serious, reliable content (or lack thereof) than a few milliseconds. I'll wait 3 seconds for good news rather than 200ms for trash. (Not at all saying legiblenews.com is trash. I've honestly never heard of it. I'm just speaking in general terms here.)
  • bradgessler 4y ago
    Ad blockers are interesting because they do make a pretty big difference. I wrote a little about that under "Less is more" at https://legiblenews.com/speed/why https://legiblenews.com/speed/why. As of June 2022, CNN.com downloads over 8.9 megabytes of images, videos, and advertisements. With an ad blocker, CNN.com still downloads an incredible 2.4 megabytes of data. All that heft means you have to wait longer for everything to download over the Internet, then wait for your browser to process it all and display it on screen. I don't really expect slow/fast news websites to be a big deal for the HN crowd since we all know how to run ad blockers in our browsers or PiHole. My goal here is to make less technical people aware of the speed they're sacrificing when they read websites like CNN, Fox News, etc. There's a lot of privacy implications too I'd like to make people aware of, but I haven't found an easy service/scanner like Google PageSpeed Insights. "Trash news" is a real problem, and no offense taken to the fact you've never heard of Legible News. I source headlines from Wikipedia, which is why I donate to them for people who buy a subscription. Legible News is more of a news aggregator than anything, which links of to news institutions that people have heard of.
    • billyhoffman 4y ago
      Sourcing your news from Wikipedia is a really smart idea. Looking at your site and the Current Events portal on Wikipedia I see some differences: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portal:Current_events https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portal:Current_events How are you pulling your data? (there are 3 different Wikipedia APIs, with various levels of data). I suggest you look at the the Features Content API (https://en.wikipedia.org/api/rest_v1/feed/featured/2022/06/28 https://en.wikipedia.org/api/rest_v1/feed/featured/2022/06/2...). This could be fun for you to use, since it also gives you a list of the most visited pages on Wikipedia in the previous 24 hours, which often surfaces interesting topics of current event. Nice job on a cool project!
• buro9 4y ago
  News websites with JavaScript disabled can be a pleasure: - https://www.theguardian.com/uk https://www.theguardian.com/uk is fast and snappy - https://www.bbc.co.uk/news https://www.bbc.co.uk/news feels like a hyper fast mobile website Both degrade wonderfully well (minor glitch on the Guardian "most read articles" HTML on mobile but otherwise all good)
  • bradgessler 4y ago
    Yes! There's so many things the HN crowd does to make websites bearable. It's sad how hostile the web has become to users, especially non-technical folks. I built Legible News for people who are non-technical and don't know how to disable JS, install ad-blockers, or run a PiHole.
• EricMausler 4y ago
  Oh I misunderstood the title implication. Nothing wrong with the title, but I thought (or was hoping) you were ranking news websites based on how quickly they publish the news in relation to the trigger event. Maybe there are solutions for this out there already, ill have to look
• strongpigeon 4y ago
  Nice work on the page and on shipping! What surprises me the most from this is how fast USA Today is given the amount of stuff going on on their page. I like how you've put the ranking by speed and I think that's a really good way to advertise your service. That being said, $9.99/mo seems pretty steep for what is basically a really fast aggregator of other sources. The $1/mo to Wikimedia is good but really just a small amount going to the creators of the actual content. $25/mo for the NYT does give you a slow website, but you know they're funding investigative journalism with it. Edit: My mistake, it's $9.99/y, not /mo. That is way more reasonable
  • O__________O 4y ago
    Website says $9.99 a year, which would be 83-cents a month, not $9.99 month as you mention. Source: https://legiblenews.com/plus https://legiblenews.com/plus
    • strongpigeon 4y ago
      Oh my bad. Yeah that's much more reasonable!
  • yuters 4y ago
    I was also surprised to see USA Today so high on the list. About 10 years ago they did a complete redesign that felt like a SPA and although it was pretty cool at the time, I remember it being very slow and clunky. They've really turned it around!
    • remremz 4y ago
      They got a new team together. The main architect is very detail obsessed about page performance.
  • chrisfrantz 4y ago
    Thought the same thing, then clicked over. There’s quite a bit going on for how snappy it feels.
• dpeck 4y ago
  It would be interesting to see the results when the requester is put behind an ad-blocker like pihole.
• cylo 4y ago
  I really appreciate this effort. I think the web needs more of it and it’s why I built something similar over at https://brutalist.report https://brutalist.report. Can you share any stats around the conversion rate for how many visitors end up converting to your Plus service?
• donohoe 4y ago
  Me too :) https://webperf.xyz/ https://webperf.xyz/ It's a 3 day running average that is focused on Article pages (not the homepage), against the mobile version of article, tested using Lighthouse. Each site gets tested 1-3 times a day. All historical data is available in Google Sheets (linked from main page) https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1sGKmbnW74u9r1GOzAQcIl3tAdLPLQ7ZkDMK2uR2HYfA/edit#gid=1647776330 https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1sGKmbnW74u9r1GOzAQcI...
  • gaws 4y ago
    > https://webperf.xyz/ https://webperf.xyz/ This is the superior tracking-news-website-speed tool.
  • tootie 4y ago
    Hey this is the site I use! It's been excruciatingly difficult to get a higher ranking when you have any ads at all.
    • donohoe 4y ago
      Very difficult. It is not just technical but there are business reasons too. That said, it is possible to make drastic adjustments that help monetization, UX, and still have ads. I did that as a short-lived experiment for a very ad heavy mobile site (SFGate): Main points are here (not a ton of details) in this sanitized post-redaction deck: https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/12ds0b4nTxzcDy23te0Zmc9UOdx8HWsTf1UECwhxkNdo/edit https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/12ds0b4nTxzcDy23te0Zm... I had an extra labeling for non-ad sites so there was some distinction and would like to restore that. However look at El Diario - ads and number 1 spot! DotDash has numerous high performant sites (ThoughtCo etc) that have ads too.
      • tootie 4y ago
        El Diario has to have some kind of crazy loophole. That or some rogue genius has solved a pernicious problem and hasn't shared their wisdom with the world. I see normal google ads and just everything loads so incredibly fast. I'm not a perf expert, but our page speed insights seem to pin almost everything on ads.
• aaronblohowiak 4y ago
  I think the time to a visible site is pretty important; i dont understand why a site that takes longer to see is faster than a site that i can start looking at sooner. can you explain that?
• chevman 4y ago
  Low latency fiber internet + network wide pi-hole ad blocking + new Apple silicon based laptop makes the entire web feel instantaneous! It’s really quite remarkable.
• hrdwdmrbl 4y ago
  Very curious that NYT's is so slow given their fairly advanced tech team. They do a lot of neat stuff with that team. Though maybe it's another part of the company that manages the rest of the site. Or maybe it's all their neat stuff that makes it slow.
  • naet 4y ago
    I am a NYT subscriber and I love what they do online. Some of the one-off special effects are a bit excessively heavy, but I appreciate the creativity and willingness to push the boundaries or explore the design space of the web. I also get the actual paper delivered in the morning, so if I need something "performant" or have a poor connection I can simply read it in print. So I appreciate that the website offers something more than just an online duplicate of the print experience. I wonder if the NYT would see an increase or decrease in conversions if they switched to a more performant but less progressive design system. Would more people convert on the fast load time? Or are the special effects diving more conversions (as they did for me personally)? I think they must have done the math and concluded that their business aligns more with the latter.
• gnicholas 4y ago
  Is this a Show HN, or a blog post? It seems like OP is trying to get attention for his news website, and perhaps that would be best done by doing a Show HN of that site (not this comparison page, which conveniently lists his website as the top-performer).
• puranjay 4y ago
  Its easy to run a fast website when you don't have to host any ads. You know, the thing that gives media companies their revenue.
  • strongpigeon 4y ago
    And yet plenty of websites that don't have ads are painfully slow. The snark is a little unwarranted in my opinion.
  • Bolkan 4y ago
    I opened the last entry (cnn) and it actually loads very quickly. The indicator keeps spinning but the content was ready in a second
• s1mon 4y ago
  I would love to see these stats for sfgate.com and sfchronicle.com. Both of them are infested with so much added fluff. It's frustrating because I pay for a subscription to SFChronicle (and NYTimes), but unless I want to install adblocking, the experience of trying to read the news is often so user hostile, even on a fast connection and fast computer.
  • bradgessler 4y ago
    You can run those pages through speed reports at https://pagespeed.web.dev https://pagespeed.web.dev I don't include in the rankings because their distribution isn't wide enough, but I'd guess they're relatively slow for the reasons you mention.
• bestinterest 4y ago
  I'm getting around 250ms response times for https://legiblenews.com https://legiblenews.com from the UK after multiple refreshes. 500ms occasionally. I feel like it could be much faster at around 50ms or so with a cloudflare caching setup on the page, may be wrong.
  • bradgessler 4y ago
    You're not imaging things: I'm running a bit hot right now from HN load (https://s3.amazonaws.com/bradgessler/Eu1cKE24dpKjTkqNcK3qPqH3mwwXirAlOJiZXN9Sd4nSOdWtU4N6Ir3NB96h0WGkXo3NzEghEzUl8dYOOwSgFhcRQlXMuy6WfruS.png https://s3.amazonaws.com/bradgessler/Eu1cKE24dpKjTkqNcK3qPqH...) w/ ~170ms for the 99th percentile. It doesn't help that I'm running this on Heroku, which isn't known for being super fast. I'll probably deploy this to https://fly.io/ https://fly.io/ in the future to a few different geographies around the world so that I can bring latency down for the entire planet while saving myself a boatload in hosting costs.
    • bestinterest 4y ago
      That is interesting to see. I wonder if fly.io/heroku matters for the servers however. Caching the webpage with a CDN sounds like most bang for buck right? One request is slow at the start of the day for the news (maybe its a user requesting far away the main server worst case) but every subsequent request is served from close to user CDN. (Not 100% if thats how it works in practice) Speaking out loud here just to see if server location matters if you have a good CDN setup or something I'm missing which would make requests need to hit the main server.
    • synu 4y ago
      Why not generate it as a static site?
• notjustanymike 4y ago
  Back in my Newsweek days, we rebuilt the entire site with a blisteringly fast homepage. Proper caching, lazy loading where needed, and fully optimized CSS, images, and javascript. Then the sales team sold a 600px wide takeover ad for scabies medication showing an old dudes infected back. So it doesn’t matter how fast you build the site. You don’t have control over the things that make it bad.
  • bradgessler 4y ago
    I was hoping some folks would chime in who built these websites! Yes, I've run big websites and they're kind of like sea faring vessels -- given enough time with a large enough team, they tend to collect barnacles and become slower over time. I made the speed rankings so that Legible News wouldn't lose site that speed matters.
    • notjustanymike 4y ago
      Newsweek was more like an active scuttling.
  • guestbest 4y ago
    Advertising is related to technology in much the same way a parasite is related to the host
  • rejectfinite 4y ago
    So with ublock origin it would be great? Do you see why we all use it?
  • Aeolun 4y ago
    Yeah, same when I was working for Nature. Website was super fast, but then we had to load the (many) ad scripts that the sales team wanted and you’d add 2+ seconds to your page load time. No way to win. At least I could wrap all the ad locations so they didn’t shift the page when they finally popped in.
    • anonydsfsfs 4y ago
• samwillis 4y ago
  Nice idea on legiblenews.com, however it looks to me like it's just using https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portal:Current_events https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portal:Current_events and changing the format? All the articles are from there, verbatim, and you are exactly copying the list of articles - even the categorisation of them. I'm not sure that a 10% donation to Wikipedia from subscription revenue is quite enough when you are doing quite a simple reformat of all the volunteer work that goes into the current events section of Wikipedia. You are effectively changing $9.99 for a weekly email digest of the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portal:Current_events https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portal:Current_events page and giving them $1. I think if you went 50/50 on it I would probably feel it was more fair, you are adding value but I assume thats all automated. I will give you credit for your 100 score, that page on wikipedia gets an 86 on page speed insights.
  • bradgessler 4y ago
    Yes! The news content and links from them are from Wikipedia, which is why I donate a portion of revenue to them. The value I'm delivering is speed and focus, going further than Wikipedia, hence your observations from the page speed score. The design of their pages is quite busy and some articles actually take a really long time to load when they're re-built from scratch and not served up from a cache. Regarding, "not enough", I'm currently losing money on Legible News, so if I increased the amount, I'd lose even more money. For now I consider a 10% donation generous given the current unit economics. I may raise prices to offset these loses, but I'll grandfather in people who subscribe today. If Legible News reaches a large enough scale I'll consider switching from the current donation model to a Wikimedia enterprise subscription (https://enterprise.wikimedia.com/pricing/ https://enterprise.wikimedia.com/pricing/) or hiring my own editorial staff to put together the days headlines. --- Edit: Oops, there's a bug on the news articles that are not displaying the license. If you want to see what this should look like, check out https://legiblenews.com/articles/Mekelle https://legiblenews.com/articles/Mekelle and scroll to the bottom and click on "License". Fixing this now for news articles. --- Update: Licenses are now working for news pages. You can see today's at https://legiblenews.com/june-27-2022/license https://legiblenews.com/june-27-2022/license. This broke navigation at the bottom, which I'm now fixing.
• permsmile 4y ago
  This seems like a https://newsasfacts.com/ https://newsasfacts.com/ clone with less features.
• srvmshr 4y ago
  Minor nitpick: India Times operates its own portal, which includes news, astrology, classifieds etc. It has much lesser footfall & lighter than Times Of India, which runs as a separate internet entity. A lot of the assets (news, photos, articles) are shared & they have common SSO as well Both are owned by Bennet & Coleman. Funnily enough, TOI runs like a subsidiary to indiatimes going by site organization structure (timesofindia.indiatimes.com) Indiatimes & Times of India aren't the same, from the internet aspect.
• micromacrofoot 4y ago
  What's a real shame is that I know that multiple news sites performing poorly on this list specifically hired outside consultants to increase their page speed. I worked at one in the past. As soon as the outside consultant leaves, everyone pushes their internal initiatives again and the sites get slow and bloated.
• gnicholas 4y ago
  What about CNET? They’ve been super fast for years. Granted it’s not general purpose news, but if you want to feature news websites that manage to load quickly, you should include well-trafficked sites like CNET, IMO.
• zendaven 4y ago
  Have you heard of News as Facts? It does a better job at telling you that the news came Wikipedia and half their profit from subscriptions goes to support Wikipedia. It's also more up to date.
• whimsicalism 4y ago
  Would like to see a comparison with wikinews
  • UmbertoNoEco 4y ago
    This site takes all the content from wikinews. There, that's the comparison.
• lukeschwartz 4y ago
  Shouldn't this be considered a news aggregator (e.g., Google News), instead of a news website? Regardless, I do believe an even simpler aggregator fetching only AP/Reuters could be maintained with something like Brave rewards in the future.
• deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
• turtlebits 4y ago
  If you're focusing on speed, why any javascript at all? I don't see any images, and the site is only updated once a day? I think you could easily go from the current 272k of resources down to under 10k.
  • bradgessler 4y ago
    It was like that before when this was a static website, but JS actually speeds up subsequent page loads via Turbo links. The other great thing about Turbo's JS architecture is that it doesn't really block things on the initial load.
• dontbenebby 4y ago
  do text.npr.org please :-)
• i_like_robots 4y ago
  I'm super pleased to see the FT towards the top of the charts. It's a couple of years since I worked on the project[1] to make it faster and it's really great the team have been able to keep it that way. We bet on measuring site speed with user centered metrics early on which was going against the grain at the time - removing above the fold CSS, are you crazy!? It took a lot of demos to convince people that what we were doing was faster, and that they really needed to trust their own eyes even when the tools disagreed! Keep it up, folks. [1]: https://medium.com/ft-product-technology/designing-a-sustainable-front-end-toolset-for-ft-com-f37c59d27eeb https://medium.com/ft-product-technology/designing-a-sustain...
  • capableweb 4y ago
    Somewhat ironic to host a performance-oriented article on Medium. It took about 1-2 seconds before the text appears (in a mostly text article), even though I have a really good internet connection right now (ping to medium.com average ~20ms, upload/download speed is ~930Mbps). Doesn't seems it's a one time thing either, hard-refresh of the page leads to same behavior.
    • i_like_robots 4y ago
      Tell me about it! "Chickenshit Minimalism - The illusion of simplicity backed by megabytes of cruft." https://medium.com/@mceglowski/chickenshit-minimalism-846fc1412524 https://medium.com/@mceglowski/chickenshit-minimalism-846fc1... (The article is also available on my personal site - about 18kb all in - for anybody who would like to read it not on a slow and increasingly walled garden website.)
      • dicknuckle 4y ago
        My least favorite part of Medium (and why I actively avoid it) is the incredible amount of recommended threads/articles focused on bad-faith arguments from neonazis or religious extremist views.
        • 4y ago
• yvan 4y ago
  I would have ranked the speed by the article's page and not homepages. As most of the users they only see the article's page, that page needs most of the attention. Homepage is usually for the hard users and they wouldn't mind a bit slower page than the article's.
• systemvoltage 4y ago
  While LegibleNews does well in speed, to me, a newspaper or a news source needs to be extremely dense. I don't want to scroll forever to painfully be blasted with negative space. A single glance at the page should reveal all headlines. NYTimes and WSJ have a really good density of information. But, my favorite is this tech news site that loads fast and is super dense: https://skimfeed.com/ https://skimfeed.com/
• colesnotes 4y ago
  I've helped work on https://www.cbc.ca/lite https://www.cbc.ca/lite over the past year or so for similar reasons, very good work on legiblenews! :clap: :clap:
• beefman 4y ago
  Reuters used to be one of the fastest. They took care of that with their 2021 redesign.
• benbristow 4y ago
  Nice analysis. For BBC though it's somewhat unfair - outside of the UK you get redirected to BBC.com rather than BBC.co.uk as the BBC in the UK is a public service and funded via the national TV licence so the UK version doesn't have ads (just like the TV channels & radio stations). Would be interesting seeing a comparison using a VPN/proxy of the UK version vs .com/commercial version.
  • rjmunro 4y ago
    Also they are testing the bbc.com home page, not bbc.com/news, which probably contains a lot of non-news. Certainly bbc.co.uk does.
  • brainwipe 4y ago
    Quite right. BBC.co.uk is mostly edge cached. Lighthouse can't test that version because of the redirect.
• 65 4y ago
  You should add https://dallasnews.com https://dallasnews.com to that list just for laughs. Last time I checked on Page Speed Insights, an article scored a 0.
• natly 4y ago
  Didn't google used to incorperate this into their search rankings? There's no way they still do that today right? Imagine how amazing it'd be if they suddenly turned on the button to downrank pages as a function of how many cookie banners and autoplaying videos etc you have to click away to get to the content.
• idealmedtech 4y ago
  If anyone is looking for a text only free version of this, check out 68k.news, found it here a few months ago.
• davkap92 4y ago
  Looks cool. Just a note might be worth mentioning you're benchmarking the desktop scores as the mobile ones can be significantly different on pagespeed insights. Maybe show/track both? Seeing as mobile usage is significant
• kyawzazaw 4y ago
  If you want a text-based format, these exist. https://text.npr.org https://text.npr.org
• derjames 4y ago
  The lite CNN website is missing from that list: https://lite.cnn.com/en https://lite.cnn.com/en
• taylorbuley 4y ago
  Higher pagespeed score does not mean faster. Even a fast website can get a poor pagespeed score. In News, a lot of the pagespeed score boils down to ad networks, TTLs on 3rd party content and, importantly, content shifts after initial paint.
• dmtroyer 4y ago
  funny, I was very surprised that USA Today was so high in the list. So I typed it into my browser and was greeted *very quickly* by a full page ad modal.
  • mikeryan 4y ago
    That modal must be baked into the site. It bypasses my ad blocking which blocks the rest of their ads.
• charlie0 4y ago
  Where are the pictures?
• pupppet 4y ago
  Man what are you doing wrong Drudge to end up near the bottom, if there ever was a site that should be at the top of this list it's Drudge Report.
  • deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  • bradgessler 4y ago
    Yeah I was surprised by this too because their total page payload is pretty light, but I ran the test a few times and it hovered around in the 40's. They're doing something wrong with their JS or their ad-auctioning script takes way too long. Details at https://legiblenews.com/speed/websites/drudge-report https://legiblenews.com/speed/websites/drudge-report and of course you can run it yourself and dig in at https://pagespeed.web.dev/report?url=https%3A%2F%2Fdrudgereport.com https://pagespeed.web.dev/report?url=https%3A%2F%2Fdrudgerep... If you look at it in your own browser, be sure to turn off your ad-blockers. Pretty zippy when you do that.
    • gmmeyer 4y ago
      I think it's a bug when I visit drudge in the browser it extremely does not take 7 seconds until it's interactive
• zahma 4y ago
  NPR.org is also pretty fast. They’ll also deliver a legible page if you disable JavaScript. No ads to boot.
• joshxyz 4y ago
  No love for Brutalist Report? https://brutalist.report/ https://brutalist.report/
• keyle 4y ago
  I remember the days when the BBC cared about speed and usability. They had a great designer at the time who posted the breakdown of his work.
• 1vuio0pswjnm7 4y ago
  The metrics focus on the website but ignore the browser/client. I use a text-only browser. It does not support Javascript. I also use TCP clients to make HTTP requests and fetch the HTML, then I read the HTML with the text-only browser. I use stored DNS data so there are no DNS lookups except one authoritative query over the loopback. With the exception of Washington Post, all news sites "load", i.e., download, at about the same speed. If one is trying to demonstrate how fast the www can be without Javascript, then it seems counterintuitive to exclusively select only big, fat, graphical, Javascript-enabled browsers for the demonstration. Those enormous, complex programs^1 are part of the problem. Keep in mind that popular websites are generally^2 designed to take advantange of "browser features" such as images, CSS, Javascript, and automatic fetching of resources from external sources. "Tech" companies desperately try to make these "complex" websites faster through "engineering", but not by changing the design to obviate the need for features and external resources. The later method works. It has been thoroughly tested by yours truly for two decades. If one uses a client that avoids images, CSS, JS and autofetching, then websites are generally faster. This method is not suitable for all websites, but it is ideally suited for websites that are textual and meant for reading, e.g., news websites. I cannot read for very long if using a graphical browser, it causes too much fatigue on the eyes. Whereas I can read for extended periods using a text-only browser on the console with zero eye fatigue. YMMV. 1. The Chrome binary, without all the libraries, is something like 150MB. The text-only browser I am using to type this comment is only 1.3MB, compiled statically. 2. HN is one exception.
  • bergenty 4y ago
    Images and videos add a lot to the news and in many cases not seeing a visual leads to an incomplete story. Of course text only will be faster, it’s not something that needs to be explicitly pointed out.
  • killingtime74 4y ago
    Interesting setup. Do you use a command line only in general or only for browsing
    • 1vuio0pswjnm7 4y ago
• SamuelAdams 4y ago
  Do you consider lite editions of sites, such as https://text.npr.org https://text.npr.org or https://lite.cnn.com https://lite.cnn.com? I use these often and they come in handy during extreme weather conditions (tornadoes) when cell service is low or impaired.
  • bradgessler 4y ago
    Not for the rankings, but I do mention them in the footnotes. Rationale at https://legiblenews.com/speed/methodology https://legiblenews.com/speed/methodology toward the bottom.
    • SamuelAdams 4y ago
      Ah, awesome. Totally reasonable explanation.
• sprobertson 4y ago
  FYI you have "Al Jazeera" misspelled as "Al Jazerra" throughout the site, though correct in URLs
  • bradgessler 4y ago
    Thanks! Fixed.
• seirim 4y ago
  We built something similar, but focused on cybersecurity news: https://cyber.report/ https://cyber.report/ And we personally curate the articles, no automated scraping :-)
• wackget 4y ago
  BBC should be tested against bbc.com/news, not bbc.com. They're very different pages/sites.
  • bradgessler 4y ago
    Thanks! Updated that to point at the URL you suggested. Didn’t do much for their rankings, but I’m pleased it’s pointing at their news website.
• na85 4y ago
  I'd be interested in seeing CBC.ca/news on the rankings, as I imagine they'd be near the bottom and they need a kick in the pants.
  • bradgessler 4y ago
    Good suggestion! “Largest general news website in $COUNTRY” is worth shooting for. They did OK scoring a 62. https://legiblenews.com/speed/websites/cbc-news https://legiblenews.com/speed/websites/cbc-news
  • colesnotes 4y ago
    hello! Have you tried https://www.cbc.ca/lite https://www.cbc.ca/lite? Would be interested in thoughts
• davidjohnstone 4y ago
  I also made a fast-loading news website. It should be roughly as fast as yours. https://www.thenewseachday.com/ https://www.thenewseachday.com/
• marban 4y ago
  https://upstract.com https://upstract.com has done the Wikipedia thing for ages.
• instagraham 4y ago
  Surprised that Indiatimes (TOI) made it so far up the list, considering how much stuff is there on their homepage. Not surprised CNN is the worst offender - it's an absolute dumpter fire of a website, filled with auto-playing ads, videos and low cunning.
• pinkmuffinere 4y ago
  As someone who hates reading the news, this idea really appeals to me! I'm tempted to subscribe, but I think I wouldn't click on the weekly email -- even one page weekly in my email seems like too much. For me, perhaps a weekly text message with just a few headlines would be better. That seems extremely low effort to check, and if I'm interesting in something I can still follow up on specific items.
• ddingus 4y ago
  Personally, I do not find speed to be a significant exception or attraction. Actually getting news is the clear winner! Thought experiment, two sites: One is quick, easy to read, but boring, low clarity. The other is slow, harder to read, but is compelling, high clarity. Now another thought experiment, and please here me out! This one is from broadcasting: Two streams or stations. Can be radio, TV, whatever: One, is boring, but pristine! Quality is off the chart good. The other, for whatever reason, is compelling! Quality is low. Crappy. ----- Answer these for both experiments: Which one do you use? Why? Which one do [you think] other people use? [And you might benefit by asking them] Why? ----- Results! In broadcast, the number one criteria was whether it was compelling. Full stop, that is what mattered to most people by a very solid majority. Almost nothing else did. And that played out with almost everyone doing broadcast of any kind moving to offer more lower quality choices to people, while at the same time delivering compelling programming to their audiences. You have probably heard the phrase, "Content is king!" For news, this will be less clear, but I bet being fast is analogous to quality in the broadcast realm. And if I am at all right about that, fast just won't get you there. Don't get me wrong. There will be a set people who go for it, but the bigger numbers will be on compelling. And that is both a different, and IMHO, a very interesting topic. Public trust in mainstream media "news" is super low. If you were to deliver compelling news from a variety of sources that have more public trust, you are very likely to attract and keep users. Again IMHO.
  • Jataman606 4y ago
    Why just accept mediocrity? The slowness of the website has no connection to quality of work that is displayed. So they can be improved separately. It doesn't have to be always choice of bad vs less bad. We should strive for something that is actually good.
    • ddingus 4y ago
      Everything costs something. Optimal profit will come from compelling delivered on good enough. It is a personal judgement from there. Secondly, one needs an audience to profit. That means speed is not top priority. Content is.
• codingp 4y ago
  god job
• ahmed_ds 4y ago
  We made a reasonable amount progress in building our own minimalist website aggregator [0] until we gave up. The plan was too source news from Reddit, HN, Several Newsletters and of course the Wikipedia News Portal. I was proud of the stack (Backend is google sheets) but I underestimated the dedication. To build a news aggregator you have to pick the news links on a daily basis and not skip a day. It takes an hour to just to sift through all the days mess as these days significant world news, in my opinion, often doesn't turn up on the front page anywhere. Also some significant world news have so much frequency you have to actually think what to post and if you should remove redundant past articles. Just picking the article took me an 1 hour a day and I wanted to summarise the content which would have easily taken my 1-2 hours more. I respect that OP is charging atleast something for their service, because if they didn't I personally don't see how they can continue running the site. [0] https://worthreading.netlify.app/ https://worthreading.netlify.app/
• deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
• MarvinYork 4y ago
  I had hoped for a comparison of how quickly news events appear on the news sites. But the comparison would only show who copy-pasted the fastest and not who researched the best. I find the speed of page views even more meaningless. ;)
• stevenjgarner 4y ago
  How do you feel about the need to customize or filter content to personal interests? I like the way reuters.com has done it with "MyView".
  • bradgessler 4y ago
    I’ve thought about it, but I’m not a fan of being able to customize what people see (or don’t see) for major news headlines. One vision I have is that millions of people from different ideologies read the exact same “front page” of news. I figure if the headlines are not sensationalized and are more factual, legible news has a shot at that. I have considered breaking apart the pages if there’s ever too much content, like having a Sports and Finance section.
• marclou 4y ago
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• unknownaccount 4y ago
  Reader Mode in Safari doesnt work.
• bjoli 4y ago
  I found that whenever I am stuck on browsers without ad blocking I tend to use my home country's public service website. It is amazing compared to the main page of just about all other news outlet, despite containing more rich content than I'd like: https://www.svt.se/ https://www.svt.se/
• whoomp12342 4y ago
  Oh, we are talking about page load speed, not like "which news source gets the story printed first". I was really excited about the latter
• firexcy 4y ago
  Some newspaper provide subscribers with the PDF version of the printed edition. I subscribe to the WSJ and find reading the PDF instead of the website a more focused, tranquil way of consuming news. Awkward as PDF is on mobile devices, it allows having a "bird view" of today's headlines, by which you can pilot or dive in freely. If the newspaper of your choice doesn't provide such service, you may try access PressReader with your library card; lots of newspapers have digital replica hosted there.
• bradknowles 4y ago
  So, when rating CNN, what about their text-only site? Are you rating any other sites that have both full-media and text-only sites?
  • bradgessler 4y ago
    Read https://legiblenews.com/speed/methodology https://legiblenews.com/speed/methodology
• Kenneth21 4y ago
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