A big challenge today for any site operator is getting their proverbial arms around third party plugins or links, with services such as Google Analytics, Adobe Omniture or social media sites and other APIs or widgets. While you want or even need to incorporate them into a high quality site they present a challenge in that the operator has no real control over how they perform. As a result, they can sometimes drag performance down without the owner having any real recourse.

As with most development challenges, this is exacerbated on mobile devices where it takes very little for download speed to be impacted. Add to this the need for news sites to offer clear, up to the minute content and you can see the challenges increase even more.

With that in mind, let’s look at the effect of third party content on sites included on the Keynote Mobile News & Portal Index. We’ll take a closer look at how third party content effects the performance of sites and some of the best practices for managing third party content effectively.

The Good

Google News loads around 50 elements and of these 44 are images. Almost all of the images are embedded directly inline to the html using DATA URI techniques. By using this technique, Google is saving 44 HTTP requests because they have embedded all of these images inline, and thus speed up the page load. This is an excellent image optimization technique.

The content is also arranged very neatly by categorizing it into different sections, which makes perfect sense for a news site. Visitors can quickly go to categories of interest such as local, world or business news, sports or entertainment. The top news in each of these categories is displayed first with an option to load more content from the same category. The Google News site also delivers tailored experiences for desktop, smartphone and tablet screens, pushing only optimized content for each of the three screens. Obviously a best practice.

Because of the way Google News is organised, each category is actually capable of loading much more content. Google makes good use of conditional loading so that content is loaded only if the user requests it, in this case by clicking on “More sources.”

Interestingly, Google does not even load their ads on the news site homepage; nor are there any third party plugins. As a result it comes in as the top performer on the Index.

The Google News site raises an important question – are the third party plugins more harmful than helpful in a high performance news site?

If the goal is to deliver up-to-date news fast, then there is something to be said for keeping the third parties out. Google clearly follows this strategy and delivers a simple, uncluttered page which also loads fast.

Similarly, another strong performer is CNN, coming in second after Google News. We see a similar implementation on Google News - always less than 40 objects on its homepage and no social media integration or video feeds. All images are scaled appropriately to the smartphone’s real estate. Multimedia gets its own tab on the homepage which loads media content when the user heads over to the audio/video section.

And with navigation, CNN also follows best practices with a drop down menu allowing visitors to go directly to a particular section without having to scroll to get there:

And the Bad

With this, obviously the converse is going to be true. MSNBC, for example, is inundated with third party content – ads from multiple channels, Twitter Plugins, Facebook Like plugins, Market Research data collected through Scorecard Research web tags, and Chart beat real time traffic and audience-behaviour data. As each of these items is fetched from different domains it inevitably starts adding considerable performance downtime.

It’s a similar case with NBC News and ABC News - too many integration items means site performance slows immediately.

Less is More

The lesson learned is that as far as mobile devices are concerned, delivering fast, easy to access news means making hard sacrifices around images, multimedia and above all those third party links. Maybe we’ll see a trend in less sharing for a change?

To view the full range of Keynote Indices, please visit:

http://keynote.com/keynote_competitive_research/performance_indices/star...  

Keynote tests the sites in the index hourly and around the clock from four locations over the three largest U.S. wireless networks, emulating the browsers of three different devices. Data is collected from San Francisco and New York and then aggregated to provide an overall monthly average in terms of both performance and availability.