Trump’s website performance before, during, and after the second Republican presidential debates on CNN continued to solidly outpace his opponents with sub-five second response times on both mobile and desktop.
Donald Trump, whose debate responses some pundits called “lightweight,” has a website that is consistently lightweight as well, but that contributes to its frontrunner status, performance-wise, so in that respect it’s a winning strategy. Weighing in at just about one megabyte, the Trump site is loading on desktops consistently in less than three seconds, and on 4G in just over four seconds, both well ahead of the rest of the candidates.
All eyes were also on Carly Fiorina to see how she performed after moving up from the undercard to primetime. While some headlines say she “crushed” it, her website performance continued to languish in the bottom third of the Republican candidate pool, with page-load times hovering in the mid-teens on both desktop and 4G.
The candidates’ websites were measured continuously by AppDynamics and summary data was collected the day before the debate and again, during, and immediately following the debate.
The Bush and Christie campaigns repeated a maneuver they used for the first debate, which was to significantly reduce the weight of their home pages so that they would load much faster on debate night, when one would expect a significant spike in traffic. The “Jeb 2016” site loaded more than twice as fast on debate night, and the Christie site shaved more than 40 percent off its load time.
The Bush and Christie campaigns are being very strategic in how they manage their sites for performance. Making those changes for debate night to speed up their sites is a smart move in anticipation of a lot of new traffic. Those new visitors are going to have a good experience, performance-wise. It’s a trade-off, though, because you want a rich content experience, too. Between the debates, they went back to their heavier pages — which in the case of Bush, was more than four times the debate night weight — 8.3 megabytes versus 2.0. That’s a huge difference.
When you look at all the candidates’ website performance, as a group their end-user response time is not all that impressive, but that can be deceptive. In most cases, their ‘time to first render’ is acceptable. Fiorina’s site, for example, has a first-render time on desktop of 3.4 seconds, which most users would consider acceptable.
Here is how the websites performed on average before the debate, measured on Tuesday, 9/15, and then during and immediately following the debate:
AppDynamics measured the ten candidates’ websites from two locations, one on the East Coast and one on the West Coast, using the Google Chrome web browser. While the actual experience of end users varies due to a variety of factors, the synthetic measurements that AppDynamics provides offer an accurate, relative ranking of the performance of the candidates’ websites.
Peter Kacandes is Senior Technical Marketing Manager of Mobile, Web, and Synthetics at AppDynamics.
The Latest
For IT leaders, a few hurdles stand in the way of AI success. They include concerns over data quality, security and the ability to implement projects. Understanding and addressing these concerns can give organizations a realistic view of where they stand in implementing AI — and balance out a certain level of overconfidence many organizations seem to have — to enable them to make the most of the technology's potential ...
For the last 18 years — through pandemic times, boom times, pullbacks, and more — little has been predictable except one thing: Worldwide cloud spending will be higher this year than last year and a lot higher next year. But as companies spend more, are they spending more intelligently? Just how efficient are our modern SaaS systems? ...
The OpenTelemetry End-User SIG surveyed more than 100 OpenTelemetry users to learn more about their observability journeys and what resources deliver the most value when establishing an observability practice ... Regardless of experience level, there's a clear need for more support and continued education ...
A silo is, by definition, an isolated component of an organization that doesn't interact with those around it in any meaningful way. This is the antithesis of collaboration, but its effects are even more insidious than the shutting down of effective conversation ...
New Relic's 2024 State of Observability for Industrials, Materials, and Manufacturing report outlines the adoption and business value of observability for the industrials, materials, and manufacturing industries ... Here are 8 key takeaways from the report ...
For mission-critical applications, it's often easy to justify an investment in a solution designed to ensure that the application is available no less than 99.99% of the time — easy because the cost to the organization of that app being offline would quickly surpass the cost of a high availability (HA) solution ... But not every application warrants the investment in an HA solution with redundant infrastructure spanning multiple data centers or cloud availability zones ...
The edge brings computing resources and data storage closer to end users, which explains the rapid boom in edge computing, but it also generates a huge amount of data ... 44% of organizations are investing in edge IT to create new customer experiences and improve engagement. To achieve those goals, edge services observability should be a centerpoint of that investment ...
The growing adoption of efficiency-boosting technologies like artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) helps counteract staffing shortages, rising labor costs, and talent gaps, while giving employees more time to focus on strategic projects. This trend is especially evident in the government contracting sector, where, according to Deltek's 2024 Clarity Report, 34% of GovCon leaders rank AI and ML in their top three technology investment priorities for 2024, above perennial focus areas like cybersecurity, data management and integration, business automation and cloud infrastructure ...
While IT leaders are preparing organizations for accelerated generative AI (GenAI) adoption, C-suite executives' confidence in their IT team's ability to deliver basic services is declining, according to a study conducted by the IBM Institute for Business Value ...
The consequences of outages have become a pressing issue as the largest IT outage in history continues to rock the world with severe ramifications ... According to the Catchpoint Internet Resilience Report, these types of disruptions, internet outages in particular, can have severe financial and reputational impacts and enterprises should strongly consider their resilience ...