

Ask HN: How does Mashable load so quickly? - astrowilliam

I&#x27;ve been wondering this for a long time. I&#x27;m not a programmer or systems admin by any means but it seems like Mashable and similar large sites load in the blink of an eye even though they have a ton of content.<p>I run a semi-popular Wordpress site and host with WP-Engine which loads pretty fast, but not even close to as fast as those guys.<p>My question is, what are they doing better and different than someone like myself to speed up load times?
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pedalpete
First off, I don't notice that Mashable loads THAT quickly, but it depends on
what you are comparing too.

I suspect the quick loading your thinking of may actually be the question of
how do they get images to load so quickly? This is the result of a CDN
(Content Delivery Network) which specializes in caching images (or content as
well, but let's just focus on images at the moment) to a group of servers
around the world, and then serving those images (or content) based on which
server will get you the content fastest (likely the one geographically
closest, though their could be others that are faster).

If you are just comparing the load time to your server, it could also be
simple server caching, network speed (as in the connection from their servers
to the network is faster than yours), etc. etc.

Larger sites need to focus on these things, your site probably doesn't at this
stage, but their are things you can do to speed up your site. I've never
worked with a WP site, so I don't know how the average site is structured, but
you could server your images from Amazon S3, make sure your javascript is all
minified and loaded at the right time, use image sprites for your non-content
images (logo, buttons, design flourishes). Then their is the speed of your
server, etc. etc.

The big thing to think about is, does your site need to be fast? Mashable
et.al, benefit from a fast site because a quicker site (I believe) gets better
results in Google PageRank, and is less likely that a person will leave if it
doesn't load quickly.

For your blog, people have likely come their for a reason, and can wait the
0.5-1 second time difference to Mashable. What may be a 1 reader difference
for you, is a 1000+ reader difference for them. Therefore, for economic
purposes, they NEED to be fast as part of their business.

