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This article really highlights something that I'm constantly amazed by - just how SLOW major media organisations are prepared to allow their websites to be. Wh

This article really highlights something that I'm constantly amazed by - just how SLOW major media organisations are prepared to allow their websites to be. When I'm designing a landing page for anything significant (product, movie, whatever), I'm looking for sub-second load times - ideally below 500ms. Why? Because there are tons of studies showing that page load speed makes a huge difference to user experience, retention, CTR, the whole nine yards. How come bigger media companies, whose expense accounts for team lunch are probable larger than my entire Web budget, fail to learn this? I'm baffled.

chrisdbaldwin 11y ago
>How come bigger media companies, whose expense accounts for team lunch are probable larger than my entire Web budget, fail to learn this? Because they want to have their cake and eat it too. They want a fast website, but they'd rather have ads everywhere and track everything.
- scholia 11y ago
  > They want a fast website, but they'd rather have ads everywhere and track everything. Aren't the ads chosen and served by third parties, and isn't almost all the tracking done by third parties? Is the real problem that leading media sites have lost control of the speed of their web pages (or lost control of a significant chunk of it) to tracking and advertising companies such as Google? I'm not a web developer, and I'm speculating from a position of ignorance, but I'd be interested to know the answer....
harryf 11y ago
Because their job is not software development, it's reporting the news and earning from advertising. Sure they have developers working _for_ them but that doesn't make them a software development company. When you factor in all the factors related to running a high traffic site these days; different browser versions, web vs. mobile, scaling etc. etc. it's unrealistic to expect them to be able to stay on top of it. Along comes Facebook and Apple News and that's the magic wand: those guys "get" software development so delegate the problem to them
Someone1234 11y ago
Gaining high speed for a small website is easier than keeping that speed as your site grows. There are numerous reasons for this e.g.: - Giving non-technical people a CMS (where they'll upload unoptimised images). - Feature creep. - More complicated infrastructure (geo-distributed, load balanced infrastructure, etc). Tuning is definitely still possible but harder. - Politics (e.g. trying to remove some pointless JS or CSS could take months and require several meetings). - The absolute cost of doing anything grows. Google and others have shown that large web-sites can keep things fast, but they've also shown it takes the entire organisation prioritising that for it to happen. I'm sure big media sites would benefit from being faster, in a measurable way, but the key is: Can you get other (non-technical) departments to agree to make real-world cuts to make that happen? Maybe.
matthewmacleod 11y ago
You are not kidding. The user experience of most media sites is appalling, mostly down to performance. Here's a great example I saw recently when I hit the Daily Mash without Ghostery enabled: https://www.dropbox.com/s/seu0run7pn4tbc6/Screenshot%202015-06-19%2011.26.39.png?dl=0 https://www.dropbox.com/s/seu0run7pn4tbc6/Screenshot%202015-... - in excess of fifty(!!) third-party scripts and trackers, rendering the browser unusable for multiple seconds. It's a frustrating, miserable experience.
- rockdoe 11y ago
  Mozilla reported an average pageload performance of 40% by just blocking the tracking scripts.
throwawayoldmed 11y ago
It's a result of two things: The company is big, and the company is legacy. The fact that the company is big means that there are siloed areas where, for example, the analytics team doesn't talk to the content team. Or the local station management doesn't talk to the CMS developers. These disconnects are present all over such organizations. This means that any changes are likely to be both overdesigned (because everyone has to have their input) and very slow to implement (because everyone has to approve). The fact that the company is legacy means that they simply view the web as another outlet for their content. They don't believe in optimizing for the web because they have many surfaces for their content, and it's historically more important for, say, the paper newspaper to be laid out correctly than the web version of the same article. These sorts of people don't change their views easily, and they still don't see the web as the primary outlet for the content (they see that as the paper newspaper, or the terrestrial radio broadcast, or the terrestrial TV broadcast). The web is always secondary at best. Overcoming these attitudes is quite difficult.

chrisdbaldwin 11y ago

>How come bigger media companies, whose expense accounts for team lunch are probable larger than my entire Web budget, fail to learn this? Because they want to have their cake and eat it too. They want a fast website, but they'd rather have ads everywhere and track everything.

scholia 11y ago
> They want a fast website, but they'd rather have ads everywhere and track everything. Aren't the ads chosen and served by third parties, and isn't almost all the tracking done by third parties? Is the real problem that leading media sites have lost control of the speed of their web pages (or lost control of a significant chunk of it) to tracking and advertising companies such as Google? I'm not a web developer, and I'm speculating from a position of ignorance, but I'd be interested to know the answer....

harryf 11y ago

Because their job is not software development, it's reporting the news and earning from advertising. Sure they have developers working _for_ them but that doesn't make them a software development company. When you factor in all the factors related to running a high traffic site these days; different browser versions, web vs. mobile, scaling etc. etc. it's unrealistic to expect them to be able to stay on top of it. Along comes Facebook and Apple News and that's the magic wand: those guys "get" software development so delegate the problem to them

Someone1234 11y ago

Gaining high speed for a small website is easier than keeping that speed as your site grows. There are numerous reasons for this e.g.: - Giving non-technical people a CMS (where they'll upload unoptimised images). - Feature creep. - More complicated infrastructure (geo-distributed, load balanced infrastructure, etc). Tuning is definitely still possible but harder. - Politics (e.g. trying to remove some pointless JS or CSS could take months and require several meetings). - The absolute cost of doing anything grows. Google and others have shown that large web-sites can keep things fast, but they've also shown it takes the entire organisation prioritising that for it to happen. I'm sure big media sites would benefit from being faster, in a measurable way, but the key is: Can you get other (non-technical) departments to agree to make real-world cuts to make that happen? Maybe.

matthewmacleod 11y ago

You are not kidding. The user experience of most media sites is appalling, mostly down to performance. Here's a great example I saw recently when I hit the Daily Mash without Ghostery enabled: https://www.dropbox.com/s/seu0run7pn4tbc6/Screenshot%202015-06-19%2011.26.39.png?dl=0 https://www.dropbox.com/s/seu0run7pn4tbc6/Screenshot%202015-... - in excess of fifty(!!) third-party scripts and trackers, rendering the browser unusable for multiple seconds. It's a frustrating, miserable experience.

rockdoe 11y ago
Mozilla reported an average pageload performance of 40% by just blocking the tracking scripts.

throwawayoldmed 11y ago

It's a result of two things: The company is big, and the company is legacy. The fact that the company is big means that there are siloed areas where, for example, the analytics team doesn't talk to the content team. Or the local station management doesn't talk to the CMS developers. These disconnects are present all over such organizations. This means that any changes are likely to be both overdesigned (because everyone has to have their input) and very slow to implement (because everyone has to approve). The fact that the company is legacy means that they simply view the web as another outlet for their content. They don't believe in optimizing for the web because they have many surfaces for their content, and it's historically more important for, say, the paper newspaper to be laid out correctly than the web version of the same article. These sorts of people don't change their views easily, and they still don't see the web as the primary outlet for the content (they see that as the paper newspaper, or the terrestrial radio broadcast, or the terrestrial TV broadcast). The web is always secondary at best. Overcoming these attitudes is quite difficult.