Does Page Performance Matter for a News Site?
At first glance I read this title as “does page performance matter on a NEW site” and I was all like….. Ummmm YES OF COURSE IT DOES.
After I read the first paragraph and realised they were talking about a NEWS site I reset my thoughts before realising — YES OF COURSE IT DOES. Performance matters on every site regardless of what the content might be… unless the purpose of your site is to annoy the readers and the site and force them to be frustrated and look elsewhere. With that little rant in my mind over I continued on with the article….
It turns out that, yes of course performance matters, however the article is well worth a read as it goes deep in to detail about the process of collecting data and turning that into actionable information.
The best part about the article was pointing out that users that don’t bounce after the first page view will end up having a faster average load time because the subsequent pages they are visiting will have elements that are already cached… therefore by the nature of some reports users that don’t bounce will be skewed to having faster average page load times even if the initial page load was slow.
There has been much research that shows that page performance — how fast a page loads — can have a significant effect on the bottom line of a company. However, most of the research is focused on eCommerce sites. I have long been interested in seeing how page performance affects users on a news site, and Vox.com gave me the opportunity to do some research.
An excerpt from Does Page Performance Matter for a News Site?
