Yahoo.com is perhaps one of the most popular web portals from the Web 1.0 era that is still alive and kicking. According to SimilarWeb, the website receives over 3.3 billion visits each month with over 50% of the traffic coming in from the United States.
A speed report from Lighthouse paints a rather grim picture and scores Yahoo.com website 3.3 seconds on the speed index (SI), and 78% on Performance.
There are many reasons why the Yahoo.com website is so slow. This includes:
- Bloated JavaScript files
- Absence of lazyloading
- Unnecessarily large image files
- Large DOM size
- Inefficient Scrolling Performance
Let’s look at each of these reasons and identify potential ways that Yahoo.com can make its 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
Yahoo.com uses a lot of JavaScript to run the website. However, loading them all from one source could slow up the performance of the website. Yahoo.com can avoid this by splitting the code into smaller files. This way, you only load files that are necessary.
The Yahoo.com website can be as much as 0.9 seconds faster by adopting this technique.
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 Yahoo.com homepage can load as much as 0.27 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 Yahoo.com website homepage can load 0.27 seconds faster if it made all the images more cellular-data-friendly.
Large DOM size
The Yahoo.com website takes close to 3 seconds to evaluate all the scripts, parse them, compile, and render them. This can be minimized by minimizing the main-thread work.
They may also look at reducing the number of nodes in the DOM. In simpler terms, you need to make sure that the main HTML code is smaller and has fewer nodes. I have explained this in greater detail in this article about DOMContentLoaded.
Inefficient Scrolling Performance
When you load Yahoo.com, you may notice a scroll jank – that is, the page stops responding to clicks and scrolls for a bit before catching up. This happens because the Yahoo.com website contains a bunch of JavaScript files with ‘active listeners’ that prevent the browser from scrolling until they are completely loaded. This can be easily avoided by the use of passive listeners – just a small tweak to code that can make your page load more seamlessly.
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.