Regarding TheNextWeb’s Shit-Ass Website

Joshua Cody tweets:

Need a warning when @gruber links to @thenextweb — 452 HTTP requests, 3.12MB, 1 minute to load, repeated Badgeville (what?!) errors.

Funny, I actually hesitated before linking to Matthew Panzarino’s Lumia review at TheNextWeb, because I dislike their website. It’s a good review, but I hate reading stuff on TheNextWeb. Even scrolling feels janky. But Cody’s numbers seem ridiculous. Why in the world would a web page require 452 HTTP requests and over 3 MB?

But lo, I measured a few of their articles using Safari’s web inspector, and Cody wasn’t exaggerating. One article at TheNextWeb weighed in at over 6 MB and required 342 HTTP requests. 73 different JavaScript scripts alone. Absurd. I did a reload on the same page a few minutes later and it was up to 368 HTTP requests but weighed “only” 1.99 MB.

Compare that with The Verge, a site in the same design genre as TheNextWeb — comments, like buttons, multiple ads per page, etc. Typical articles at The Verge take about 110 HTTP requests, and weigh about 500 KB. That’s heavy compared to, say, Daring Fireball, but in my opinion quite reasonable given The Verge’s design.

How long it takes to load the page is part of the reading experience. Bandwidth is not free, and not universally fast. People are using 3G for chrissakes. If every article on the web weighed 3 MB, you’d eat through a 2 GB data cap by reading only 20 articles a day. Not watching video — just reading.

★ Tuesday, 29 November 2011