Measuring Global Performance of Top News Sites with an API Call

by Interzoid Team

---

Posted on November 7th, 2019

---

---

Large news sites typically have global audiences, as do other modern businesses. However, Web traffic, regardless of site content, can often be lost due to sluggish page loads, especially with mobile users. Therefore, it's a good exercise to measure how Websites and specific Web pages perform from international locations. Accordingly, we thought we would test how several top global news organizations are performing with respect to page load time. CNN, Fox News, MSNBC, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Al Jazeera, the South China Morning Post, the BBC, the UK Daily Mail, and Yahoo and Google news sites were included in this page load performance testing exercise.

Here are the average home page load time results across the globe ranked in order of performance for these news organizations' content home pages. This is the average of home page load times using the Interzoid Global Page Load API to simulate a browser page load from different locations around the world. These time measurements were taken using the API's ability to monitor performance via actual home page loads from servers at different physical global locations including California, Virginia, London, Paris, Frankfurt, Stockholm, Tokyo, Hong Kong, Singapore, Sydney, Montreal, Mumbai, and São Paulo. Measurements were taken at several times per day over the course of twenty-four hours for comprehensive results. Individual region results follow the aggregated average results.

Average global performance time across all locations:
===============================================================
1) CNN (.10 seconds)
2) New York Times (.11 seconds)
3) Fox News (.15 seconds)
4) Al Jazeera (.23 seconds)
5) MSNBC (.26 seconds)
6) BBC (.27 seconds)
7) South China Morning Post (.37 seconds)
8) UK Daily Mail (.55 seconds)
9) Wall Street Journal (.66 seconds)
10) Google News (1.20 seconds)
11) Yahoo News (1.59 seconds)

Many factors can influence these results, including whether or not Edge Computing caching networks are in place, page size, advertisements, Internet routing choices, infrastructure investments based on target geographical markets, target network traffic loads, Javascript callback usage, dynamic image loading, and several others. This is why multiple measurements from multiple locations at different times of day are important, and different browser implementations may provide different results. These numbers represent the initial HTML payload from initiation to completed home page download.

Here are the results on a regional basis utilizing multiple measurements at different times of the day:

(ranked by average recorded seconds of load time)

Singapore
--------------------
1) BBC (.02)
2) CNN (.05)
2) New York Times (.05)
4) Fox News (.13)
5) Al Jazeera (.20)
6) MSNBC (.21)
7) South China Morning Post (.22)
8) Wall Street Journal (.59)
9) UK Daily Mail (.68)
10) Google News (.90)
11) Yahoo News (1.70)

Paris, France
--------------------
1) New York Times (.04)
2) CNN (.05)
3) Al Jazeera (.11)
4) BBC (.18)
5) UK Daily Mail (.19)
6) MSNBC (.22)
7) Fox News (.23)
8) Wall Street Journal (.40)
9) South China Morning Post (.73)
10) Google News (.99)
11) Yahoo News (1.24)

San Francisco Bay Area, California
-----------------------------------------
1) CNN (.04)
2) New York Times (.06)
3) Fox News (.10)
4) MSNBC (.13)
5) BBC (.20)
6) Al Jazeera (.23)
7) Wall Street Journal (.25)
8) South China Morning Post (.29)
9) UK Daily Mail (.58)
10) Yahoo News (.66)
11) Google News (.96)

Sydney, Australia
------------------------
1) New York Times (.08)
2) CNN (.09)
3) Al Jazeera (.14)
4) Fox News (.18)
5) South China Morning Post (.24)
6) BBC (.29)
7) MSNBC (.37)
8) UK Daily Mail (.84)
9) Wall Street Journal (.96)
10) Google News (1.52)
11) Yahoo News (3.52)

Frankfurt, Germany
--------------------------
1) CNN (.05)
1) Al Jazeera (.05)
3) New York Times (.09)
4) Fox News (.10)
5) UK Daily Mail (.17)
5) MSNBC (.17)
7) BBC (.20)
8) Wall Street Journal (.52)
9) South China Morning Post (.58)
10) Google News (.84)
11) Yahoo News (1.26)

Tokyo, Japan
------------------------
1) MSNBC (.09)
2) Fox News (.11)
3) CNN (.17)
4) New York Times (.19)
5) Al Jazeera (.37)
6) South China Morning Post (.42)
7) BBC (.48)
8) Wall Street Journal (.84)
9) UK Daily Mail (1.07)
10) Google News (1.28)
11) Yahoo News (2.53)

London, England
--------------------------
1) BBC (.04)
1) New York Times (.04)
1) Al Jazeera (.04)
4) CNN (.05)
5) Fox News (.08)
6) Wall Street Journal (.27)
7) South China Morning Post (.29)
8) UK Daily Mail (.31)
9) MSNBC (.35)
10) Google News (.91)
11) Yahoo News (1.00)

Hong Kong
----------------------------
1) New York Times (.04)
2) CNN (.13)
3) South China Morning Post (.14)
4) Fox News (.25)
5) Al Jazeera (.26)
6) MSNBC (.37)
7) BBC (.67)
8) Wall Street Journal (.77)
9) Yahoo News (1.61)
10) Google News (1.94)
11) UK Daily Mail (1.46)

Mumbai, India
------------------
1) Fox News (.18)
2) MSNBC (.20)
3) South China Morning Post (.22)
4) UK Daily Mail (.28)
5) New York Times (.32)
6) BBC (.35)
7) CNN (.42)
8) Al Jazeera (.45)
9) Google News (1.34)
10) Wall Street Journal (1.93)
11) Yahoo News (2.46)

Stockholm, Sweden
-------------------
1) Al Jazeera (.02)
2) CNN (.03)
3) New York Times (.03)
4) Fox News (.04)
5) MSNBC (.05)
6) BBC (.06)
7) South China Morning Post (.30)
8) UK Daily Mail (.32)
9) Wall Street Journal (.36)
10) Google News (.98)
11) Yahoo News (1.07)

Washington D.C.
-----------------------------
1) CNN (.02)
2) New York Times (.03)
3) BBC (.05)
4) MSNBC (.06)
5) Fox News (.07)
6) Wall Street Journal (.26)
7) UK Daily Mail (.28)
8) South China Morning Post (.34)
9) Al Jazeera (.38)
10) Yahoo News (.74)
11) Google News (1.01)

Montreal, Canada
--------------------------
1) CNN (.11)
2) New York Times (.13)
3) MSNBC (.18)
4) Fox News (.24)
5) Wall Street Journal (.26)
6) BBC (.30)
7) Al Jazeera (.34)
8) Montreal (.37)
9) UK Daily Mail (.39)
10) Yahoo News (.75)
11) Google News (1.02)

São Paulo, Brazil
----------------------
1) CNN (.12)
2) Fox News (.21)
3) New York Times (.29)
4) Al Jazeera (.34)
5) UK Daily Mail (.60)
6) BBC (.61)
7) South China Morning Post (.70)
8) MSNBC (1.00)
9) Wall Street Journal (1.19)
10) Google News (1.94)
11) Yahoo News (2.17)