The Daily Mail is a British tabloid newspaper with the highest number of paid subscribers in the country at over 810K readers
A speed report from Lighthouse paints a rather grim picture and scores The Daily Mail website 15.2 seconds on the speed index (SI), and 59 on Performance.
There are many reasons why The Daily Mail website is so slow. This includes:
- Bloated JavaScript files
- Unused CSS files
- Absence of lazyloading
- Unnecessarily large image files
- Old Image formats
Let’s look at each of these reasons and identify potential ways that The Daily Mail can make their website load faster.
But before we do that, a quick word about our website CWVIQ.com - we are a free email alert service that sends out notification any time your website is loading very slowly (often due to heavy traffic, or poor scripts). If you have a website, consider setting up an alert so that you can fix issues before they become major. Bloated JavaScript files
The Daily Mail uses a lot of JavaScript to run the website. However, loading them all from one source could slow up the performance of the website. The Daily Mail can avoid this by splitting the code into smaller files. This way, you only load files that are necessary.
The Daily Mail website can be as much as 6.75 seconds faster by adopting this technique.
Unused CSS files
The Daily Mail uses CSS files to load the styling elements for the website. However, this file contains a lot of unused scripts that can be slowing down page loading by as much as 1.02 seconds. Code splitting may help avoid this issue.
Absence of lazyloading
Images and videos are by far the most resource-intensive assets and take up a lot of bandwidth during the page-loading process. This can be a real problem on shopping websites since they typically include a lot of graphical content.
But here is the thing – a user who visits the website is not going to need all the images on the page to load. Instead, they only need those images on the top fold of the website to load. The rest can be ‘lazy-loaded’ – that is, they can be loaded after all the other critical components of the webpage have completed loading.
The Daily Mail homepage can load as much as 3.24 seconds faster if images were lazyloaded.
Unnecessarily large image files
Another common problem that users face – especially when they access the website while on the move – is having to load unnecessarily large image files that are not optimized for the mobile phone. Not everyone has access to WiFi at all times. Loading oversized product images is unnecessary.
According to the Lighthouse estimate, The Daily Mail website homepage can load 2.28 seconds faster if it made all the images more cellular-data-friendly.
Old Image formats
The Daily Mail website uses a lot of JPG and PNG files that are considered outdated and heavy for modern web use. Replacing them with WebP and AVIF files can save as much as 3.1 seconds from the page loading time.
Anand Srinivasan is the founder of CWVIQ, and has been in the internet media space for over 15 years. He has previously served as the AVP of Products and Head of Business at popular media portals. He has worked with several SaaS and enterprise businesses as an external consultant for their SEO marketing campaigns.
DM is a horrible website – go on it and every time it’s ”wait, or exit page”…
continually unresponsive ..very slow .have to exit page not able to read .sucks !!!
Daily mail Online is so slow slow. They have the same pictures one after the other, month after month. Some a dozen identical pictures (They are paid per picture). Recently, carpet bombed with hundreds of adverts, most to the right and the left of your peripheral vision. When attempting to read an article, it becomes like a computer game, simply not worth the hassle.You then try and read the comments section, and the screen jumps/jiggles then you are carpet bombed with scrolling down a thousand adverts. Your computer is then slowed down. You clear it with browsing history, and within 5 minutes the same happens yet again. Is it worth all the headache ? No. They need to employ the previous people. The alternative is, their will be no readers bothering to read what has become “The daily adverts”