From PBS
I present your winner (or loser?) for slowest loading feature article, the Chicago Tribune, at 16.68 seconds, almost 6 megabytes of data, and with more than 300 requests for resources to display the page in question. In fact, the Tribune was the slowest out of the 15 sites tested three out of five times.
How can this be? The Chicago Tribune, ranked as one of the most trafficked U.S. news sites, is also one of the slowest sites on the Internet (well, not quite, but in the context of these tests is really, honestly, objectively, “dog slow”). I reached out to several people at the Tribune for comment on this story, but did not hear back before publication.
At a time when even the mainstream media is reporting that “bloated web pages are costly for smartphone users” and when Google has made it clear that slow pages impact a page’s rank and that it takes speed into account in its search rankings, how is it that some of the Internet’s most-visited news sites can get away with thumbing their nose at the need for speed?
The Tribune is not alone in their sluggish response to this issue.
