Gawker readers are leaving in droves. Is slow performance partly to blame?

From the blog of Strangeloop president, Joshua Bixby:

Gawker Media’s radical redesign of all its sites has left a lot of readers unhappy, and they’re apparently leaving in droves. TechCrunch reports that a couple of the sites have suffered major traffic hits, with Gizmodo and Gawker.com losing up to half of their accustomed page views.

The comments from upset readers point to issues with the sites’ new design and architecture, but my hunch is that people will often complain about a website’s design, when what they’re really reacting to is speed and usability. So I ran Webpagetests on Gawker’s three biggest sites, then compared them to archived tests from November 2010.* (Here’s where I thank Pat Meenan profusely for keeping such a great public archive of old tests. It’s really useful to have them around for benchmarking purposes.)

Read the full post here.