The fastest news websites (and why speed matters)
We’re not talking about how quickly they break news, but instead how long it takes their pages to load. Learn which sites load the fastest—and slowest.
Page speed is not a major ranking factor (according to Google it impacts roughly 1 in 100 searches), but it does have a direct and indirect impact not only on search engine optimization (SEO), but also on social media activity and the overall user experience. For these reasons it is something that is worth paying attention to.
For this year’s comparison I started with the group of sites I looked at last year and added the majority of sites from “News Organizations on Google+: Which Pages Get the Most Engagement?”
For simplicity, I pulled PageSpeed Online scores for the home page of each news site. PageSpeed scores are on a 0 to 100 scale with a higher number indicating better performance.
Here are the fastest—and the slowest—news sites in 2012:
Yahoo News is the winner, coming in with a high score of 96. The U.K.’s Mail Online and Business Insider round out the top three with similarly high scores.
The top 10 all received scores of 90 or higher with six sites tied for fifth place.
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