At The Telegraph we’re currently going through a process of rebuilding our public-facing website. This gives us the opportunity to take learnings from the existing build but also write some of the code from scratch. You can see our progress so far on pages such as Gaming and Culture. We can monitor the impact this has on metrics across usability, performance and accessibility.

We’re incredibly passionate about the web, particularly performance, and regularly attend local meetups such as LDNWebPerf to learn from others in the industry. We knew web performance was crucial to the success of our new website but didn’t know how to introduce the topic into an organisation with more than 160 years of history and in excess of 1000 employees. We recognised that with millions of visits per month, performance improvements would be of huge value to our users.

We started slowly, fixing the immediate problems within our technical control: this brought good results but only accounted for 5% of the requests. We knew we would have to start working with the wider business to tackle the rest.

Improving the performance impact of third-party scripts on a website takes time; results won’t come overnight, but by being patient and chipping away slowly, eventually these efforts will be rewarded.

Creating a Performance Culture

The most important and hardest thing to achieve when tackling web performance at The Telegraph was trying to instil a performance culture. A lot of the performance challenges we have faced have not been technical but have been ‘organisational’. Everyone wants ‘that tag’ on a page which will make the organisation money so it was very important that we get the right individuals in a room to educate, challenge and work together.

We set up a web performance working group and invited people from across the company — covering Advertising, Marketing, Commercial and of course Technology. The meetings are run fortnightly and we use them as an opportunity to review third-party tags, discuss current challenges and work as a cross-organisational team to try to make our web pages as fast as possible.