The Irish Times has been trying to reinvent itself over the last year or so.
Both the online and offline editions of the newspaper have been given design overhauls, but the online version might need a few more tweaks.
Running it via a couple of tools that check how quickly it loads the results are a bit .. well see for yourself below ..
GTMetrix gives it a score of C and D. The frontpage is very very big and takes a long time to load:
Running it through Pingdom’s full page test gives similar results:
James has been posting a bit about speeding up websites over on his new blog, which is sort of why I was interested in this, though I’ve always been aware of how quickly a page will load for people on slower connections.
But even if you don’t get into crazy technical analysis of a website’s size in bits, bytes etc., the frontpage of the Irish Times website is currently too big to fit on floppy disk!
By comparison Pinterest, which is 100% image driven, is only 853kB (if you’re not logged in)
Yahoo! Ireland is under 400kB
https://developers.google.com/speed/ is a handy checklist too
We have seen good increases in rankings and conversion every time we improved load time. It is well worth doing.
Phil has written about some of the more technical aspects of this here: http://blog.whatclinic.com/?s=speed
Alan