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Comment by amanzi | Hacker News Reader

I'd love to hear from those of you who do web work for these types of big companies. Do they just not care about performance or are there other issues at play? I've dabbled with some small sites and would get stressed if the page load was more than a couple of seconds. How can these companies with large budgets find it acceptable that page loads can take tens of seconds while jumping content around the page or locking up threads with massive JS?

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In my experience with non tech clients, the website is built using Wordpress, hosted by the agency, and presented in a board room. The presenter will connect a newish MacBook into the projector after lots of fuss about the right dongle type and proceed to click around. The decision maker at the company will verify items against their memory and usually things that users do not care about, like they will ask who agreed to have a photo of the red car instead of the blue car because if they recall everyone had agreed to the blue car. Oh it was the red car after all. Really, because the blue car looked better. Oh it was a placeholder image of a different racing team. Oh well in that case it’s fine.

+1 for the chuckle. This is exactly how it goes.

My experience from working at a car company (although not in the F1 area):

This kind of work is typically outsourced, since it's not a core competency for the company. So the company would be contracting some web development agency which builds a homepage and potentially also hosts it. There are contracts and specifications in place around what needs to get built. In the web development domain I don't think the outsourcing aspect is a big plus or minus on execution ability. There will be some good and some bad agencies around - and an internal team might not really be doing a better job.

Regarding performance: They mostly wouldn't even recognize. The work is presented with some fast connection and device, so it's not visible. And even if it would be, the people responsible for it (or even the leads of those companies or teams) are not that tech savy and will just accept it as the current state of the art.

There will be far bigger discussions around other things than performance. E.g. which images and fonts are to be used, how trademarks and the brand are represented, etc.

Most execs have the assets already cached so they dont realize. And if you tell them to clear their cache and revisit the site they will scoff and tell you to "scurry off with your technical nerdistry!" I don't bother trying to rock the boat anymore. It is never appreciated, only scolded as if you are a pedantic whiner.

That's because you're bad at marketing. Imagine how differently you'd be received if instead of saying "here's how slow it is if I clear my cache" you said "here's what a new visitor who has never been to our site before experiences".

I wish that were the reason. In large companies, the communication channels can be as bad as it is to outside customers. Put your energy into things that reward you back for good faith efforts. Large companies often have power structures entrenched by other factors than efficiency and function.

But who is going to say that? The web developer is going to go to the CEO and say "look how slow the site I just made is!"?

The Haas cached second load is slower than the first. You can't blame that one on execs already having the assets...

Code is written by web devs that are more designers than devs with little optimization skills on expensive high end hardware. Work is reviewed by executives on expensive high end hardware. My experience anyway.

That belittles designers -- designers understand what slow means too and can use Google to find a solution.

I used to work at an ad agency several years. We were locked into Wordpress or Drupal with Bootstrap and some base plugins for sliders as well as a ton of stuff for 'SEO' and tracking. The amount of time allotted to deliver the project was actually pretty small. You would get a mild scolding if you even bothered to look at performance. A lot of these things are a part of the theme/plugin out of the box and may not be optimized, but the images and the content was usually uploaded by an intern or whatever and they never bothered with image optimization.

in our case (a major online retailer), some of the problems are coming from the marketing department. we watch the data thoroughly, as we need each year to prepare for black friday, but after that some guy from marketing inserts through tag manager another tracker or any other crappy script that also heavily affects frontend performance.

we actually care about that, but our options are limited. of course, if the performance is heavily affected we can tell them to buzz off, but usually it's not a single tool that generates the problem, but the sum of all of them.

on the other hand, i'm aware that there's some value added by those tools.

I find it interesting that Google tries to stress website performance and even goes to such extremes as creating a new, stripped down HTML spec (AMP) while simultaneously shipping bloat-ware enabling products like Google Tag Manager.

Well, i’m not a web dev, but as a long time fan I may offer some personal opinion on this. First, who visit these sites? Nowadays fans just follow twitter and Instagram for related info, and would-be sponsors have no reason to take a look at sites looking for interest. This is such a small field with huge public info availability no body needs info from web site to relate. The only time I tried to visit team website is to shop some fan stuff. I guess the teams also know this so they can’t care less

Agreed. I am an avid F1 fan, but I don't think I have ever visited a constructors site in all the decades I have been into the sport. At most I will visit the main formula1.com site, mainly to find out race times or to watch highlights of a race I missed (and a site which I hoped the OP would measure alongside the team sites), or else consume information via Youtube, Instagram and other aggregate sites. No interest in just seeing a fancy moving brochure site that doesn't tell me any more than the others I mentioned above.

Given the amount of analytics scripts in these pages, someone at these places must care about them.

They are normaly done by boutique development agencies with ZERO thought to the real world.

Well. These are just anecdotal from one job in an agency which also sells websites for some bigger companies... and I hope this stuff is rather not standard... but if I had to guess it's something like:

- bad project management from the client (they often don't care about technical quality or rather can't evaluate it)

- bad project management from the web contractor (they often don't care about technical quality or rather can't evaluate it)

- the web agency has too many projects due and needs to deliver asap

- exhausted & mismanaged dev teams (+ freelancers) which are constantly working on short lived projects, which are a mess because nobody doesn't really care

Also I am amazed over and over again how a lot of managers (or people) will lie straight to your (or the clients) face if they can thereby save their ass.

If you have 100+ developers pushing to a repository, unfortunately many of them don't care about introducing a 100ms regression here and there, and that's how you end up with a slow page.

The performance of a website very often depends on how important the site is to their sales. For many companies who aren't selling direct to consumers, a fast website isn't their biggest priority.

One thing that wouldn't surprise me would be to see that the websites for some of the companies mentioned in the article are running on SharePoint. --If tuned properly, it can be quite fast, but like other solutions, it can also feel bloated and slow if it's not prioritized.

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