Post Web site loads too slowly - The Washington Post

&#62; In finding solutions, The Post doesn’t want to sacrifice ad revenue. Nor does it want to give up much of the valuable marketing information that comes from the tracking of your reading habits.<p>Translation: You're not the customer, you're the <i>product</i>.<p>I've seen this story too many times: We want high performance, AND we want a simple user interface, AND we want these 20 features, and we will not listen to the tech guys who tell us we can't have it all. Something has to give.

I disable javascript on the Post website. I did it initially because they did something that breaks in Opera recently, but the page is noticeably snappier and more usable. I haven't missed anything by turning it off.

When I hear about a slow loading site, especially due to many third party includes and dependencies my secondary concern from an operational perspective is what happens when those 3rd party links go down?<p>Does the page load up as blank? Stop loading halfway through? Very difficult for WashPost to achieve high availability when they only control a portion of the experience.

It amazes me how many high traffic sites seemingly can't be bothered to test their sites with YSlow or Google Page Speed.<p>For example, The Post gets a D from Yslow, as does Techcrunch, but they aren't the worst of the pack as ReadWriteWeb gets an abysmal F.

It's not the video or whatever, it's just observing some basic rules:<p>-Combine external JavaScript<p>-Enable gzip compression<p>-Leverage browser caching<p>(As suggesteg by Chromes Inspector)<p>As well as<p>-Using css embeds where possible<p>-Severside caching if they don't do that already

Just loading JavaScript in a non-blocking fashion would probably improve apparent page-load time significantly.

At least it loads faster than Salon.com. <i>Everything</i> loads faster than Salon.com.