[HN Gopher] Show HN: I ranked news websites by speed
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Show HN: I ranked news websites by speed
I've been working on building "the fastest news website" for a few
reasons: 1. I got tired of waiting for news websites to load, so I
made a text-only news website that only has major news headlines.
2. I wanted to demonstrate to the world that if you want to build
something really fast on the web, you can do it without loads of
JavaScript. 3. I wanted to show that you can design something that
looks good without having tons of images, etc. I put together the
speed page at https://legiblenews.com/speed to hold my website to
be more accountable for speed, but it's also interesting to see how
fast other news websites are (or in most cases, are not). Some
feedback I'm interested in receiving: 1. What's your take both on
the speed ranking methodology for Legible News? 2. Are my
descriptions of the metrics for a non-web developer reasonable?
Example of that at
https://legiblenews.com/speed/websites/associated-press, and if you
click through the links on that table, you see a description like
https://legiblenews.com/speed/audits/cumulative-layout-shift Sorry
ahead of time, but I can't fit all news websites on the speed
report. I had to target general news websites, not ones for
specific niches like HN for Tech. If there's something you think
that's missing please post it, but I can't promise that I'll add
it. If you like it, please consider subscribing! Thanks!
Author : bradgessler
Score : 181 points
Date : 2022-06-28 17:35 UTC (5 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (legiblenews.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (legiblenews.com)
| s1mon wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| You can run those pages through speed reports at
| 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.
| zendaven wrote:
| 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.
| EricMausler wrote:
| 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
| bestinterest wrote:
| I'm getting around 250ms response times for
| 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 wrote:
| You're not imaging things: I'm running a bit hot right now from
| HN load (https://s3.amazonaws.com/bradgessler/Eu1cKE24dpKjTkqNc
| K3qPqH...) 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/ 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Why not generate it as a static site?
| yvan wrote:
| 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.
| lukeschwartz wrote:
| 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.
| dmtroyer wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| That modal must be baked into the site. It bypasses my ad
| blocking which blocks the rest of their ads.
| strongpigeon wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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
| strongpigeon wrote:
| Oh my bad. Yeah that's much more reasonable!
| yuters wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| They got a new team together. The main architect is very
| detail obsessed about page performance.
| notjustanymike wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| guestbest wrote:
| Advertising is related to technology in much the same way a
| parasite is related to the host
| rejectfinite wrote:
| So with ublock origin it would be great?
|
| Do you see why we all use it?
| dpeck wrote:
| It would be interesting to see the results when the requester is
| put behind an ad-blocker like pihole.
| natly wrote:
| 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.
| [deleted]
| metadaemon wrote:
| You might be able to squeeze out some more speed with Brotli and
| enabling http/2 on Cowboy.
| cylo wrote:
| 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.
|
| Can you share any stats around the conversion rate for how many
| visitors end up converting to your Plus service?
| idealmedtech wrote:
| If anyone is looking for a text only free version of this, check
| out 68k.news, found it here a few months ago.
| donohoe wrote:
| Me too :)
|
| 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/1sGKmbnW74u9r1GOzAQcI...
| tootie wrote:
| Hey this is the site I use! It's been excruciatingly difficult
| to get a higher ranking when you have any ads at all.
| aaronblohowiak wrote:
| 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?
| charlie0 wrote:
| Where are the pictures?
| beefman wrote:
| Reuters used to be one of the fastest. They took care of that
| with their 2021 redesign.
| chevman wrote:
| 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.
| samwillis wrote:
| Nice idea on legiblenews.com, however it looks to me like it's
| just using 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 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.
| 101008 wrote:
| Thanks for mentioning and noticing it. I like the original idea
| (one of those that I thought myself doing back during the
| pandemic), but seeing it is just a wrapper around another
| source made it lost its magic, at least for me.
| zendaven wrote:
| Also it's been done better by https://newsasfacts.com/, which
| actually does give 50/50 like you suggested.
| O__________O wrote:
| News as Facts also gets a 95 on page load speed:
|
| https://pagespeed.web.dev/report?url=https%3A%2F%2Fnewsasfac.
| ..
| [deleted]
| O__________O wrote:
| If true, and appears it is, if the source for the feed really
| is Wikipedia, shouldn't it be credited on the site?
|
| Related Wikipedia page on reusing it's content:
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Copyrights
| bradgessler wrote:
| It is, see the "License" link at the bottom of pages that
| display Wikipedia content. Front page currently points at
| https://legiblenews.com/june-27-2022/license.
|
| Note: there was a bug that I fixed at around noon PST that
| wasn't display this link for daily news articles, but it was
| for the contextual articles.
|
| I intend on fully complying with Wikipedia's copyright
| notices. If you see otherwise please LMK because its a bug.
| itake wrote:
| PST or PDT? I didn't think anyone was using PST anymore
| :-/.
| themodelplumber wrote:
| Um, you mean they're not using it until November?
|
| https://www.timeanddate.com/time/zones/pst
| itake wrote:
| The US hasn't used PST to describe current time since
| March 13th.
| themodelplumber wrote:
| Yeah, and then it will be used again starting this
| November. It hasn't gone away permanently IOW, unless you
| know otherwise.
| bradgessler wrote:
| How about PT :-)
| bradgessler wrote:
| 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/) 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
| 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. This
| broke navigation at the bottom, which I'm now fixing.
| gnicholas wrote:
| > _I 'm currently losing money on Legible News_
|
| > _The news content and links from them are from Wikipedia_
|
| How are you losing money if all of your content is from
| Wikipedia, and presumably free?
| runnerup wrote:
| Close to zero income plus hosting fees most likely. If I
| built something like this I'd expect to lose money on it
| for awhile as well. I'd also expect to have to deliver a
| bit more "product" but I feel this guy is having a ton of
| fun with this project. I'd love to see it grow and develop
| into something amazing.
|
| In fairness, it doesn't seem to be offering much at the
| moment, but I'm genuinely curious about the directions the
| owner imagines taking the project.
| bradgessler wrote:
| This is accurate.
|
| Current costs are:
|
| 1. Hosting - $30-$60/mo depending on traffic levels. The
| more subscribers, the more this will cost.
|
| 2. Workstation - Its fractional, but the workstation I
| use to build this isn't free.
|
| 3. Dev time - This is the big one. If this is to become
| sustainable, I'd need to build up subscription fees to
| pay for a team. $200k/engineer, administrative staff, and
| whatever an editorial staff costs if I go down that
| route.
|
| Saying "it costs nothing" would be a recipe for
| eventually shutting down this website since I'd be
| working towards none of the infrastructure above that's
| needed for this thing to continue on without me.
|
| I also want to build out a mobile application, which also
| costs money in the form of App Store fees and dev time.
|
| Keep in mind: I'm not targeting the HN crowd with this,
| who know how to find CurrentEvents, throw it in their RSS
| feed, find the optimized mobile version, etc. This was
| built for people who don't have the time or knowledge to
| do the digging needed to find and format this content.
|
| What HN found interesting was the relative rankings of
| news website speed, which I hope brings awareness and
| results in faster websites for us all.
| gnicholas wrote:
| > _1. Hosting - $30-$60 /mo depending on traffic levels.
| The more subscribers, the more this will cost._
|
| Does the cost of subscription pay for the hosting costs?
| It sounds like this is the only current hard cost, so
| hopefully it's growing slower than the associated
| subscription revenue!
| cauthon wrote:
| > Hosting - $30-$60/mo depending on traffic levels. The
| more subscribers, the more this will cost.
|
| > Workstation - Its fractional, but the workstation I use
| to build this isn't free.
|
| > Dev time
|
| I mean, no offense, but it sounds like you don't actually
| have any costs besides hosting, and you'll break even
| somewhere between 40 and 80 subscribers.
|
| I think what everyone's objecting to is your
| misrepresentation of the content on the home page as your
| work. Nothing on the "today's news" or "about" pages
| credits Wikipedia or its contributors.
| nabakin wrote:
| Photopea.com was able to keep their hosting costs down to
| about $50/yr while still serving 7 million people[1].
| Their website was hosted statically at a size of 1.8
| megabytes. Yours is different of course because you
| scrape Wikipedia regularly, but there may be a cheaper
| solution than your current setup out there for you fyi
|
| [1] https://old.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/i8j5te/i_made_
| a_free_...
| muzani wrote:
| If OP had 7 million people, they wouldn't be losing
| money, even if it were serving ads.
| onion2k wrote:
| _Hosting - $30-$60 /mo depending on traffic levels_
|
| Stick it on Netlify and that cost will drop to $0.
| cypress66 wrote:
| When you say losing money, do you mean opportunity costs from
| your time developing it?
|
| Because running a website like that should cost basically
| nothing.
| moneywoes wrote:
| Why are your costs so high?
| samwillis wrote:
| So I actually love the idea, even using Wikipedia! Their
| news/current affairs section is amazing, but not accessible
| or readable in a "new site" like way. If I were you I would
| be championing that aspect, making it a key feature, talk
| about how it is making this amazing resource accessible. But
| part of that would be to donate a larger portion to them.
| Just charge $20/year and give Wikipedia half...
| em500 wrote:
| The mobile version
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portal:Current_events is
| less busy and arguably better readable/accessible than the
| desktop version.
| bradgessler wrote:
| I'm not committing to that specific price change and
| donation reallocation, but I will raise prices in the
| future (if you subscribe now you'll be grandfathered in)
| and changing the donation allocation with Wikipedia.
|
| The problem now is that fixed costs are barely covered.
| Once that hump is achieved I can start playing around with
| donation allocations more. It will take some time to get
| there as the cost structures aren't that well established
| yet.
| ysavir wrote:
| > 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.
|
| This feels in very bad taste to me. As another user pointed
| out, these articles are being authored and maintained by
| volunteers, who are donating their time and effort to make
| information accessible to people. Instead of joining them in
| that pro-bono effort, you're trying to leverage their work to
| your own profits. Yes, it requires some up-front work from
| you to format the articles, but it's a one time cost while
| the authors are continuously working. And sure, you have to
| pay for hosting costs, but then you could still run it as a
| non-profit that only recoups costs and donates the rest to
| Wikipedia.
|
| If you want to make a business out of this, I'd suggest
| investing in having people author some original articles. But
| taking someone else's volunteer work for your own gain is not
| something I will support. Not wanting to invest your own time
| and money to make your project work long-term doesn't justify
| using other people's time and efforts to make your project
| work long term.
|
| If there's any part of your data pipeline that I
| misunderstand and rectifies the situation, I'd be happy to
| have my understanding fixed.
| bradgessler wrote:
| I occasionally make edits to the structure of the original
| content, but given my limited resources, which is a
| fraction of my personal time, that's all I can do. In the
| future if this brings in more revenue I will consider
| donating more to Wikimedia, hiring editorial staff to
| contribute back to CurrentEvents, or purchasing a Wikimedia
| Enterprise subscription.
|
| I do want to acknowledge and be upfront that I won't be
| able to satisfy everybody's level of fairness, taste, etc,
| but this is currently what is sustainable for me given the
| amount of time and resources I have available to put into
| this project. Some will think this is done in very bad
| taste, like yourself, and others won't. That's fine! I
| accept constructive or thoughtful critiques and will
| reflect on them in the future as things change.
| colonwqbang wrote:
| I don't understand why you would feel that way. Under
| Wikipedia's license:
|
| > You are free to:
|
| > Share -- copy and redistribute the material in any medium
| or format
|
| > Adapt -- remix, transform, and build upon the material
| for any purpose, even commercially.
|
| This seems like exactly the kind of behaviour they want to
| encourage. It's not taking anything away from the project,
| just adding another way to consume the information for
| those who choose to.
| [deleted]
| systemvoltage wrote:
| 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/
| pupppet wrote:
| 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.
| benbristow wrote:
| 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.
| davkap92 wrote:
| 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
| permsmile wrote:
| This seems like a https://newsasfacts.com/ clone with less
| features.
| taylorbuley wrote:
| 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.
| dontbenebby wrote:
| do text.npr.org please :-)
| gravypod wrote:
| Odd to see CNN last when https://lite.cnn.com/en exists. Maybe
| that should be another entry?
| april_22 wrote:
| Didn't know https://lite.cnn.com/en exists
|
| Looks very clean, thanks for this
| metadaemon wrote:
| Got a 96 for me:
| 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%2Flegiblene...
| metadaemon wrote:
| Oops that was on the Mobile tab. Both score 100 on Desktop.
| bradgessler wrote:
| 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/Eu1cKE24dpKjTkqNcK3qPqH...
|
| 99th percentile is at 175ms.
| turtlebits wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| This. There is no need for a cloud server. Even better
| get a 10GB port private server from Interserver and stop
| using Heroku.
| bradgessler wrote:
| 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 (I still need to
| refine it; wrote and published in haste)
| synu wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| The goal is clearly self-promotion, and not neutral
| observation.
| LeoPanthera wrote:
| 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
|
| There's also http://68k.news which is particularly nice
| because it hyperlinks to images in the stories rather than
| embedding them.
| WA9ACE wrote:
| Tangentially https://lite.pbs.org/ also launched this year.
| jwilk wrote:
| 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-f...
|
| https://lite.cnn.com/en/article/h_fdb58e07457b1cd96266160502...
|
| Does anyone know how to automatically map one to the other?
| stuross wrote:
| 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
| enlyth wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| derjames wrote:
| The lite CNN website is missing from that list:
| https://lite.cnn.com/en
| turtlebits wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| 65 wrote:
| You should add https://dallasnews.com to that list just for
| laughs. Last time I checked on Page Speed Insights, an article
| scored a 0.
| srvmshr wrote:
| 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.
| kyawzazaw wrote:
| If you want a text-based format, these exist.
|
| https://text.npr.org
| hrdwdmrbl wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| micromacrofoot wrote:
| 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.
| twobitshifter wrote:
| in addition to lite.cnn.com please add text.npr.org
| bradgessler wrote:
| I linked to it at https://legiblenews.com/speed/websites/npr
|
| CNN too at https://legiblenews.com/speed/websites/cnn
| gnicholas wrote:
| 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.
| i_like_robots wrote:
| 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-
| sustain...
| capableweb wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Tell me about it!
|
| "Chickenshit Minimalism - The illusion of simplicity backed
| by megabytes of cruft."
|
| 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.)
| 12ian34 wrote:
| great work to you and the team. I absolutely adore the FT
| website. the subscription is worth every penny and a large part
| is the user experience for me
| bradgessler wrote:
| This is awesome! I hope more news websites take notice of this
| report and clean up their act to make things faster.
| z3t4 wrote:
| Good decision to focus on user perceived performance rather
| then "Google/SEO performance". Also returning user experience,
| and actual user experience (using the site app/as a user) is
| very important meanwhile most only measure first load
| performance.
| gnicholas wrote:
| 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).
| colesnotes wrote:
| I've helped work on https://www.cbc.ca/lite over the past year or
| so for similar reasons, very good work on legiblenews! :clap:
| :clap:
| ARandomerDude wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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. 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 wrote:
| 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
|
| 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://e
| n.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!
| puranjay wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| And yet plenty of websites that don't have ads are painfully
| slow. The snark is a little unwarranted in my opinion.
| whimsicalism wrote:
| Would like to see a comparison with wikinews
| UmbertoNoEco wrote:
| This site takes all the content from wikinews. There, that's
| the comparison.
| buro9 wrote:
| News websites with JavaScript disabled can be a pleasure:
|
| - https://www.theguardian.com/uk is fast and snappy
|
| - 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 wrote:
| 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.
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(page generated 2022-06-28 23:00 UTC)