“What the heck is he doing writing about food on a Monday?”
(Photo credit: Wikipedia)
Given that it’s Thanksgiving week here in the US I’ve got food on my mind more than I usually do. However, while cookies is the theme, it’s not about the sugary kind.
I was reading a bunch of sports sites as part of a research project when I came to one that seemed to lock up my browser As it turned out, this site (which shall remain nameless since singling them out doesn’t serve any purpose) hadn’t locked me up but it was taking forever to load. I opened a new tab and hit another site which popped right open. Returning to the slow-poke, I took a look at what the page was doing as it loaded. Imagine my surprise when I had a look at all the external (meaning off the site’s own servers) scripts and cookies that were running.
While my browser had taken the site’s primary analytics cookie (hey, I’m in the business so I like to help others learn) as well as their main ad serving cookie and even their Twitter tracker, my browser had blocked 66 third-party cookies. Each of those took a call to a third-party server. These were ad networks, retargeting firms, on site ads from third parties, behavioral targeting firms, etc. The page (and each subsequent page, as it turned out) took a long time to load . While it came right up the browser won’t respond since dozens of scripts are running. Maybe a great revenue experience for the site owner but for we lowly users, it sucked.
One solution to this issue might be Google Tag Manager or deferring the parsing of JavaScript but it really goes beyond that. Years ago there was a real emphasis on light page weights (the amount of code on the page as well as all the images, etc) and fast load times. With the advent of broadband, I can’t recall having that conversation with anyone lately and maybe that’s a bit of negligence. In addition to the SEO benefit fast pages get, they’re better user experiences. That’s a broader point no matter what business you’re in. If the focus isn’t on making your product the best it can be for your consumers, you need to refocus. While I get that for media the “consumer” is the person buying the eyeballs you’re aggregating, without a good experience to bring those eyeballs back again and again, you won’t be in business for very long.
In other words, lay off the cookies! Thoughts?
Consult Keith 