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Trump Triumphs In 4G Mobile and Website Performance

Peter Kacandes

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.

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Trump Triumphs In 4G Mobile and Website Performance

Peter Kacandes

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.

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According to Auvik's 2025 IT Trends Report, 60% of IT professionals feel at least moderately burned out on the job, with 43% stating that their workload is contributing to work stress. At the same time, many IT professionals are naming AI and machine learning as key areas they'd most like to upskill ...

Businesses that face downtime or outages risk financial and reputational damage, as well as reducing partner, shareholder, and customer trust. One of the major challenges that enterprises face is implementing a robust business continuity plan. What's the solution? The answer may lie in disaster recovery tactics such as truly immutable storage and regular disaster recovery testing ...

IT spending is expected to jump nearly 10% in 2025, and organizations are now facing pressure to manage costs without slowing down critical functions like observability. To meet the challenge, leaders are turning to smarter, more cost effective business strategies. Enter stage right: OpenTelemetry, the missing piece of the puzzle that is no longer just an option but rather a strategic advantage ...

Amidst the threat of cyberhacks and data breaches, companies install several security measures to keep their business safely afloat. These measures aim to protect businesses, employees, and crucial data. Yet, employees perceive them as burdensome. Frustrated with complex logins, slow access, and constant security checks, workers decide to completely bypass all security set-ups ...

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In 2025, enterprise workflows are undergoing a seismic shift. Propelled by breakthroughs in generative AI (GenAI), large language models (LLMs), and natural language processing (NLP), a new paradigm is emerging — agentic AI. This technology is not just automating tasks; it's reimagining how organizations make decisions, engage customers, and operate at scale ...

In the early days of the cloud revolution, business leaders perceived cloud services as a means of sidelining IT organizations. IT was too slow, too expensive, or incapable of supporting new technologies. With a team of developers, line of business managers could deploy new applications and services in the cloud. IT has been fighting to retake control ever since. Today, IT is back in the driver's seat, according to new research by Enterprise Management Associates (EMA) ...

In today's fast-paced and increasingly complex network environments, Network Operations Centers (NOCs) are the backbone of ensuring continuous uptime, smooth service delivery, and rapid issue resolution. However, the challenges faced by NOC teams are only growing. In a recent study, 78% state network complexity has grown significantly over the last few years while 84% regularly learn about network issues from users. It is imperative we adopt a new approach to managing today's network experiences ...

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