How the FT has sped up its page loading

Jessica Davies of Digiday writes about how the Financial Times has increased its page loading time.

Davies writes, “The FT site is less cluttered than some of its peers with trackers that slow sites down, according to Ghostery. The FT homepage has 13 trackers, according to Ghostery. The Wall Street Journal has 24. There is still room for improvement, though. According to Google’s PageSpeed Insights tool, the FT’s homepage scores 40 out of 100 for mobile performance. Desktop ranks slightly better, at 59.

“Next FT’s design, content and ads reflect its aim of being more customer behavior-focused, he said. It is now adopting what Bede calls a ‘front-page mentality’ of print when designing mobile experiences, ensuring the content and features are stripped back to the bare essentials. For its webpages, it cut back on ads, marketing scripts and analytics tools.

“‘There are a plethora of tech companies pitching anything from analytics packages to personalization software, all stuff that can slow things down,’ McCarthy said.”

Read more here.

Chris Roush

Chris Roush was the dean of the School of Communications at Quinnipiac University in Hamden, Connecticut. He was previously Walter E. Hussman Sr. Distinguished Professor in business journalism at UNC-Chapel Hill. He is a former business journalist for Bloomberg News, Businessweek, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, The Tampa Tribune and the Sarasota Herald-Tribune. He is the author of the leading business reporting textbook "Show me the Money: Writing Business and Economics Stories for Mass Communication" and "Thinking Things Over," a biography of former Wall Street Journal editor Vermont Royster.