text.npr.org is fast!
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When you first visit text.npr.org it is jarring to see no heading, graphics, columns or other such things that news sites offer. I don’t like that, and find it off-putting. But when it comes time to actually read an article it REALLY shines, as highlighted by the screenshot below. In almost imperceptible 31ms an article is completely loaded and renders, plus the first 3-4 paragraphs are visible “above the fold.” The exact same article on npr.org takes 2.75s seconds to load and render and exactly zero paragraphs are visible above the fold. text.npr.org is awesome!
You can see the stats at the bottom of the screenshot where I have Dev Tools open. The text version’s single request is astonishingly fast to connect, download and render. Conversely, the rich site involves requests for 24 xhr, 37 scripts, 8 stylesheets, 69 images, 3 fonts and 5 frames.
