Theverge.com scores 25/100 on Google's Pagespeed Insights tool (mobile)

wpskidd · on July 15, 2019

Pagespeed (and my favorite: Gtmetrix), are very revealing. You would be surprised how many big, tech-savvy companies have abysmally performing websites.

It is also interesting to see the details of all the baggage that something like a single YouTube embed inflicts on your site performance. Sometimes it is over 50 individual server calls as well!

I honestly believe that Google has been downplaying how much this hurts your search rankings. The best first step for improving SEO (IMHO) is to make your page load fast. Usually, it is a fairly easy fix and your visitors will be rewarded as well.

iruoy · on July 15, 2019

With an adblocker it's a very fast site and I like how it looks and reads.

However I turned it off after I saw this and immediately the frontpage took ~4x as long to load and only showed a black screen for most of that time.

green-eclipse · on July 15, 2019

Verge loads an absolute crapton of 3rd party trackers and scripts. It's absurd. Ghostery has a field day on that site.

whalabi · on July 15, 2019

I recently rejigged some of unlikekinds.com for performance and accessibility and climbed up Google fairly significantly, pretty much overnight.

I can only imagine The Verge would be pulling in a lot more traffic and ad dollars if they did the same.

But then, maybe the effect of all the links to the site completely outweighs any negative effect from slowness.

That said, if the site is really experienced that slowly, it might be that a high proportion of users give up before a page loads.