Post Web site loads too slowly - The Washington Post | Hacker News Reader

Post Web site loads too slowly - The Washington Post

washingtonpost.com

23 pointsamr15 comments

> In finding solutions, The Post doesn’t want to sacrifice ad revenue. Nor does it want to give up much of the valuable marketing information that comes from the tracking of your reading habits.

Translation: You're not the customer, you're the product.

I've seen this story too many times: We want high performance, AND we want a simple user interface, AND we want these 20 features, and we will not listen to the tech guys who tell us we can't have it all. Something has to give.

In the context of the Post, these are excuses. They even admit that their site loads more slowly than all of their competitors. What does the Post's site do that the New York Times, Guardian, and Reuters don't?

Sounds like the WaPo site has ceased being a website and become a bikeshed, instead.

I worked for a major news agency recently and speed/page weight where two things we worked damned hard to tackle.

The publishing frameworks are to blame on the most part. We spent 6 months working on caching fixes to deal with that. The site is still pathetically slow even after 6 months, my suggestion to management was throw the baby out with bath water and migrate to a new bespoke purpose fit solution. But that option scares the hell of out management (especially when they are generally sales men).

Caching aside the rest come from tracking software. Infact from time to time neilson would add 50% load time a page, google analytics was only slightly better, but I have watched nelson hang a page for 30 seconds. Even with delayed loading, browsers are horribly unruly beasts :)

The sad fact is demographics are everything, without it the news site doesn't exist. You need to be able to go to market and say we have X demographic give us that huge client spend. Which for the uninitiated one sale can be more than what an entire months of Google ads will bring in.

So the comment is 100% correct, news sites are in the business of tracking you. Because without it people won't spend with them, and Google ads won't even cover hosting costs let alone paying journalists to cover stories. Big media is extremely expensive to produce, its not like some aggregator site like Digg or Reddit which get stories for free, you need to be able to send people to location, put them up in hotels, feed them etc...

And with that knowledge there is no way in hell that could could ever make an argument to remove those tracking scripts :/

I disable javascript on the Post website. I did it initially because they did something that breaks in Opera recently, but the page is noticeably snappier and more usable. I haven't missed anything by turning it off.

When I hear about a slow loading site, especially due to many third party includes and dependencies my secondary concern from an operational perspective is what happens when those 3rd party links go down?

Does the page load up as blank? Stop loading halfway through? Very difficult for WashPost to achieve high availability when they only control a portion of the experience.

When all the 3rd party content is linked properly (i.e. <script> blocks at the bottom of page) - nothing bad happens, you would just see blanks instead of third-party content.

When it's not linked properly (as far as I know most of those 3rd party services by default advertise the "wrong" way) - not only it would display a blank or half-blank page when the 3rd party service is down, also all the page loads are noticeably slower for everyone on every page load.

I.e. I use neither facebook nor twitter nor google+, but half of the internet is loaded a few hundred milliseconds slower because every page is crammed with their fairly useless buttons.

Why useless? First, that functionality should be part of the browser, not of the webpage. I should have a share button in my browser, for every page I see, and also it would prevent those services from tracking me.

Is there an firefox/chrome extension that:

- Provides Like, Tweet, +1, Digg and all the buttons in the toolbar (only ones I need)

- Prevents browser from accessing button embeds therefore disabling tracking?

I would install it in a heartbeat.

First, that functionality should be part of the browser, not of the webpage.

This is why I prefer a bookmarklet, for the specific (of the 100s possible) social sharing site I happen to like to use.

It amazes me how many high traffic sites seemingly can't be bothered to test their sites with YSlow or Google Page Speed.

For example, The Post gets a D from Yslow, as does Techcrunch, but they aren't the worst of the pack as ReadWriteWeb gets an abysmal F.

I was amazed too. Also at this public sneer from an editor: Won't developers feel responsible for this?

They again, they include javascript files with a copyright from 2007 (http://www.washingtonpost.com/rw/sites/twpweb/js/wp_omniture...). They source javascript files of 5 lines of length. They forget alt attributes on navigation images. And they wrap their stories in this soup:

  #wrapperMainCenter, #wrapperInternalCenter, #container, #pagebody, #pagebody-inner, #article, .blog_entry, #c-main-content, #center, .content, .hnews hentry item

That can't be result of a single developer, or even of a single project.

There currently is nothing to fix when - to keep advertising and tracking going - you are faced with over 100.000 bytes of third party javascript code (I stopped counting).

Next to a complete redesign, a mentality change would be needed. Sure, you can asynchronously load a single compressed and combined core javascript resource just before <body> close. But would the advertisement department of The Washing Post be happy if all advertisements showed up 5 seconds after the content has loaded?

I wouldn't even know where to start bothering with this massive site. There must be 10+ projects with different developers all working over the years to build things like the Sports Section, the classifieds section etc. All using their own javascripts and style sheets... Perhaps a good CDN to patch this oil tanker.

But would the advertisement department of The Washing Post be happy if all advertisements showed up 5 seconds after the content has loaded?

I can almost see how that conversation could go down. "Our users are staring at half-rendered content during the 15 seconds our site takes to load! Scramble the web team! That's blank real estate that could use some ads on it!"

It's not the video or whatever, it's just observing some basic rules:

-Combine external JavaScript

-Enable gzip compression

-Leverage browser caching

(As suggesteg by Chromes Inspector)

As well as

-Using css embeds where possible

-Severside caching if they don't do that already

Just loading JavaScript in a non-blocking fashion would probably improve apparent page-load time significantly.

At least it loads faster than Salon.com. Everything loads faster than Salon.com.

That's not that surprising when you look at what grades Salon.com gets from Page Speed and YSlow (a C and E, respectively): http://gtmetrix.com/reports/salon.com/Tebabbbf

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