Today (July 12th, 2017) a large number of sites have joined together to raise awareness of the threats to network neutrality. For example, reddit has a pop-over window that slowly types a message beginning with “The internet’s less fun when your favorite sites load slowly, isn’t it?” This is certainly a valid concern, and many people, including myself, have legitimate concerns about how the Internet is regulated. But there are enough sites raising that point, so I’d like to talk about something different – how sites are “shooting themselves in the foot” with slow-loading (and often buggy) page content.

It all starts when a web site decides they want to track visitors for demographics or other purposes. There are a large number of “free”* tools available that will collect the data and let you analyze it in any way you like. Sure, it comes with some hidden Javascript that does things you can’t see, but hey – it is only one thing on a page of otherwise-useful content, right?

Next, the site decides they’d like to help cover the cost of running the site by having a few advertisements. So they add code provided by the advertising platform(s) they’ve selected. So their page now loads a bit slower, and users see ads, but the users will still come for the content, right? And the occasional malware that slips through the advertising platform and gets shown on their site isn’t really their fault, right? They can always blame the advertising platform.

Somewhat later, the site gets an “offer they can’t refuse” to run some “sponsored content”. The page gets even slower and users are having a hard time distinguishing actual content from ads. Clicking on what looks like actual content causes an ad to start playing, or triggers a pop-under, or any one of a number of things that make for an unpleasant user experience.

Once everyone is used to this, things appear to settle down. Complaints from users are infrequent (probably because they can no longer figure out how to contact the site to report problems). Everyone has forgotten how fast the site used to load, except for the users running ad blockers, cookie blockers, script blockers, and so on.

But one day a SSL certificate becomes invalid for some reason (expired, a site was renamed, etc.) and the users are now getting a new annoyance like a pop-up saying that the certificate for btrll.com is invalid. Most users go “huh?” because they weren’t visiting (or at least they thought they weren’t visiting) btrll.com. Clicking the “close” button lasts for all of a second before the pop-up is back, because that ad site is determined to show you that ad. In frustration, the user closes their browser and goes out to buy a newspaper.

By this point, perhaps 5% of the actual page content is from the site the user was intending to visit. The rest is user tracking, advertising, and perhaps a bit of malware. There is a free tool run by WebPagetest.org which will let you analyze any web site to see what it is loading and why it is slow.

Here is the result for the CNN home page:

Now, that’s too small to be able to read, so this is the first part of it (click on this image for a larger view):

The blue line at 21 seconds shows when the page finished loading, although you can see that Javascript from a number of advertising providers continues to run indefinitely.

Now, let’s take a look at Weather Underground. Surely just serving weather information would have far less bloat than CNN, right? Not really:

Now, that’s too small to be able to read, so this is the first part of it (click on this image for a larger view):

It does manage to load in less time than CNN, but it is still pretty awful.

In the spirit of full disclosure, here is the result for this blog page:

Since the entire report fits, I didn’t need to add an unreadably-small overview image.

If you manage a web site, I encourage you to try WebPagetest.org yourself and see why your site is slow. If you’re just a user, you can also use WebPagetest.org to see why the sites you visit are slow. If you’re using add blocking or site blacklisting software while you browse, the list of hosts that are serving advertisements or other unwanted content will probably be useful to you when added to your block / blacklist.

* As they say, “If you aren’t paying for it, then you are the product being sold”.