Yahoo News, New York Times and CNN news sites need to go on a diet while Google News probably needs a makeover. A first-time user visiting CNN.com will have to wait 40 seconds to load up the website using high speed internet access. We recently did some tests and analyzed our website here on profitimo.com to see how we can optimize our site to reduce download and page rendering times. To compare ourselves, we took a sample of popular news websites to compare our site to. We were surprised to find out how bloated some of these top news sites are.
One key metric of in web analytics is bounce rate, defined by Wikipedia as "the number of web site visitors who visit only a single page of a website per session divided by the total number of website visits". Many new websites have bounce rates in the range of 80% and up of visits. A top sites like Yahoo will have lower rates but I believe there is much room for improvements. Improving site rendering and download times can definitely reduce bounce rates and help build a better relationship with your users!
Over time, many sites like CNN or Yahoo have forgotten how important it is to reduce web page download times. Gone are the days of slow internet access...or is it so? According to OECD, only 16.9 subscribers our of 100 inhabitants have access to broadband in a 2006 research. OECD tracks a list of 30 countries and defines broadband as internet speeds of 256kbps and up. This means, many visitors are still having a hard time visiting your site.
Google understands this than anyone else. Not surprisingly, their "fast is better than slow" is one of their guiding principles.
Today websites have gotten alot more complicated. A first time visitors will not only have to load a simple static web pages with a couple of images. Let's take a look at what's being downloaded.
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Html web page that display the content
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Images such as logos, icons and banner ads
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Videos such as youtube
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Widgets are common sightings on many sites now.
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Javascripts used to display Google ads and create interactivity on the site.
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CSS used to define the layout of the website
Your objective is to let first time visitors to quickly load up your website and have as many of those objects like images or css file to cache in their browsers. Once they go deeper in to other pages of your site, users can download secondary objects like javascripts to handle ads.
The more objects downloaded on the first visit, the longer it takes to render a web page. If our goal is to bring the best experience to new and existing users, here are 3 simple tips to help slim down your web site main landing page.
Tip 1. Reduce the number of multimedia ads (e.g. images, videos, flash, etc) on the main page. Nytimes.com definitely need to work hard on this. Their site has over 15 such ads on the main page. In our test, this site has over 288KB of images! It's more important bait and lead your visitors deeper into your website. That's how you build a deeper relationship with your visitors.
Tip 2. Optimize and minimize your javascripts. Yahoo News and CNN.com load their main page with 221,000 and 269,000 bytes of javascript respectively. Google has 43 bytes! So it's not a question of whether it's possible. But are we willing to?
Tip 3. Cut down on the CSS stylesheets. Cascading stylesheets are used to format the layout of the web page. Both Yahoo News and CNN have stylesheets over 140Kilobytes. Google and MSNBC has none.
In our research, we tested just a few top news sites ranked by Alexa.com. We used this free Web Page Speed Analysis tool from Websiteoptimization. A simple tool with a lot of information that can help you easily optimize your website.
Here's a summary of our research on the new websites.
news.google.com
Total download size: 119 KB
Download time: 4 seconds (using 256kbps)
Note: Google news has the smallest download size among the test sites. You won't see any ads at all on any of its main and sub-pages. There are actually about 25 small thumbnail images along its news headlines. Each thumbnail is no bigger than 2KB.
Msnbc.msn.com
Total download size: 212 KB
Download time: 7 seconds
Note: MSNBC news site came in second in our test for download speed. MSNBC strikes a good balance between speed and appeal. On their main page, they have a couple heavy flash ads. Many of their thumbnails are quite big size too. I think there's certainly lots of room for improvements. While surfing around the pages, you can actually feel some sluggishness when it comes to rendering.
Nytimes.com
Total download size: 385 KB
Download time: 12 seconds
Note: Just ads alone, there were close to 20 ads in the form of images. NYTimes is in dire need for a strict diet here. New York Times is a great franchise on and offline. I love visiting this site. But they really need to cut down the content on the main page. Less is more. Try to bait your users deeper. With technology and business intelligence, you can display popular articles on the main page without having to throw everything on one page.
news.yahoo.com
Total download size: 458 KB
Download time: 14 seconds
Note: Yahoo News site looks streamlined to the naked eye. But hidden under this is over 300KB Javascript and CSS files! Take them all off or reduce them and you'll get a snappy site. What's nice though is its main page has only few tiny ads. Yahoo attempts to pack as much information using their tabbed content modules. With the help of scripting, news headlines are loaded instantly without refreshing the entire page. Additionally, placing your mouse over one of the headlines below, you will see a thumbnail and descriptions. Seriously, I don't think this work. I never click on those tabs nor do I have the time to wait for the descriptions to load up. Great idea but it doesn't work. Keep it Simple and Stupid!
news.bbc.co.uk
Total download size: 281 KB
Download time: 9 seconds
Note: Surprisingly, I think BBC news site that got it right. It probably has the best compromise between speed, appeal and usability. It has only one banner ad on the side. The main page is not too long. Thumbnail images are tiny enough to make it visually attractive. I can see the site editor take a lot of attention to put what's important on the main page with their goal to get their users deeper into their site.
CNN.com
Total download size: 659 KB
Download time: 21 seconds
Note: If it wasn't for its great franchise on TV, I can't imagine why anyone would want to visit their site. The site is bloated. Too many ads and images along with heavy javascript and CSS files.
No doubt content is still king. If your site makes it so hard for your visitors to get the content, you kinda have to ask...whats the point after all?
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Justin Lim is currently the Content Editor and Head of Marketing and Sales for Profitimo.com. He enjoys looking at everything in a marketing perspective and does everything for fun.
