Back in my Newsweek days, we rebuilt the entire site with a blisteringly fast homepage. Proper caching, lazy loading where needed, and fully optimized CSS, images, and javascript. Then the sales team sold a 600px wide takeover ad for scabies medication showing an old dudes infected back.
So it doesn’t matter how fast you build the site. You don’t have control over the things that make it bad.
I was hoping some folks would chime in who built these websites!
Yes, I've run big websites and they're kind of like sea faring vessels -- given enough time with a large enough team, they tend to collect barnacles and become slower over time.
I made the speed rankings so that Legible News wouldn't lose site that speed matters.
Yeah, same when I was working for Nature. Website was super fast, but then we had to load the (many) ad scripts that the sales team wanted and you’d add 2+ seconds to your page load time.
No way to win. At least I could wrap all the ad locations so they didn’t shift the page when they finally popped in.
I've been in the same situation, and it's one of the few times I've appreciated the bureaucracy and red tape that come with being at a Fortune 500 company. Whenever the sales team comes to me asking for another tracking pixel, I just say "We'll be happy to add this once you've submitted the necessary paperwork and it undergoes the the company-mandated security, privacy, and legal reviews". 90% of the time, I never hear back from them again.
Yeaaaaap. I ended up implementing a library for Newsweek that converted document.write ad units into async writes. I'm still amazed that worked, and that ads used to use document.write.
So it doesn’t matter how fast you build the site. You don’t have control over the things that make it bad.