HTTP Archive Analysis of News Homepages
Here’s a quick analysis I did for Speedometer 3 about the size of the DOM for some common news sites, in order to support the development of a test covering interactions within a complex news-like site.
How this was done
- Gather a list of sites from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:News_sources and child pages.
- Run some BigQuery SQL against the HTTP Archive desktop and mobile crawls from 2023_03_01 to generate the average DOM depth, total element count, number of css variables, and a few other data points. These rely heavily Custom Metrics (with links to the specific metric in the table caption below).
Some more details and the source code to reproduce the results are available at this gist.
The raw and aggregated data is available in this spreadsheet.
Results
| Average | Median | Max | Standard Deviation | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| mobile | 11.99 | 11 | 128 | 7.17 |
| desktop | 12.15 | 11 | 131 | 7.36 |
| Average | Median | Max | Standard Deviation | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| mobile | 1856.04 | 1621 | 10444 | 1357.67 |
| desktop | 1911.26 | 1714 | 10444 | 1351.03 |
| Average | Median | Max | Standard Deviation | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| mobile | 31.54 | 0 | 887 | 99.59 |
| desktop | 34.43 | 0 | 887 | 101.19 |