The Slowest Loading Sites on the Techmeme Leaderboard: Scobleizer, PreCentral, Cult of Mac

Frederic Lardinois

Jun 14, 2011 — 2 min read

With Instant Pages, Google launched a new product today that could significantly speed up page load times for sites that rank high in the company’s search results. There is a clear need for a product like this. While Google today said that the average website loads in about 5 seconds, new data from Aptimize, a service that specializes in making sites and apps load faster, shows that when it comes to tech news, the average site on the Techmeme leaderboard takes about 11 seconds to load. That’s 4 seconds longer than the average Fortune 500 website.

Here are the slowest loading sites among most influential tech news blogs according to Aptimize: Scobleizer, PreCentral, Cult of Mac, MocoNews and Gizmodo.

It’s worth noting that some of these sites see much faster load times for repeat loads. For Scoble’s site, for example, the load time goes down from over 30 seconds to just about 4 seconds for repeat visitors.

Full disclosure: this site ranked as the 87th “fastest” with a horrible load time of over 18 seconds when it was still called NewsGrange. That made it a bit faster than GigaOM and slightly slower then TechCrunch. Thanks to some more powerful hardware and a smarter web server configuration, pages should load significantly faster now.

It’s worth noting that Aptimize looked at how long it took these sites’ homepages to load. Individual posts will likely load a lot faster, as they generally feature significantly fewer images.

What’s Slowing These Pages Down?

According to Aptimize, these are the top reasons why some of these pages load so slowly:

[list type=”tick”] [li] Advertising-heavy pages: this becomes a real issue when sites allow ads to block other content from being loaded[/li]
[li]Analytics products that run in the background, unknown to the user: Google Analytics ranks among the fastest of these statistic products[/li]
[li]Social media widget-heavy pages (including multiple Tweet, Facebook and Digg buttons per page)[/li]
[li]Improperly sized and uncompressed images [/li] [/list]

Here is also a list with some of the raw data for the top 20 on the Techmeme leadderboard:

You can find the full report, including a more detailed analysis of what’s slowing these pages down here.

📝Google's surprise AI podcast hit

Google used to be a company where experimentation was encouraged -- or at least it felt like that from the outside. Now it's hard to remember when Google last launched a new product that was an immediate hit. But with NotebookLM and its AI podcasts, Google finally scored

🪧 Pressed words

I don't think anyone outside of Matt Mullenweg had the recent WordPress/WP Engine drama on their bingo card for this year. After a bit of early confusion, I think it's now clear that this is, in many ways, an extension of the open source discussions

🔒Now's the time to prepare for the post-quantum era

I've followed the development of quantum computing for the better part of the last decade. For the longest time, it's been "just around the corner" and with the advent of generative AI, any of the hype around the technology has receded into the background.

The week after CrowdStrike

It's been a week... Given everything that's happened lately, it's hard to believe that the CrowdStrike outages hit only a week ago. We're now deep in the clean-up phase of that particular disaster and while the blame for this particular incident falls

What’s Slowing These Pages Down?

Read more

📝Google's surprise AI podcast hit

🪧 Pressed words

🔒Now's the time to prepare for the post-quantum era

The week after CrowdStrike