Room: Performance
Composition in Green, 100/100/100/100
A daily news site that took six seconds to show a headline on a phone. Two weeks later the scores were four green circles, and the newsroom framed them.
Curator's note
Denní Kurýr publishes around eighty articles a day for readers who mostly read on phones, on the tram, on patchy signal. The site had grown heavy with ads, trackers and a front-end framework doing everything at once. They wanted speed without a rewrite and without losing the ads that pay for the journalism.
From the visitors' book
“We printed the four green circles and hung them in the newsroom. It's the only picture nobody argues about.”
Wall text
Before touching anything, the artist measured: a week of real readers, and the same three journeys on a cheap phone on a throttled connection. Most of the six seconds went into code the article page never used.
Ads that wait their turn
The ads still pay for the journalism, but they now load after the story, in boxes of a fixed size, so nothing jumps while you read.
The budget
A performance budget now runs on every change: a pull request that adds more than 15 kB to the first load fails, with a note saying what grew.
Installation views
The guided tour explains the circles. Nobody asks what they measure.
Provenance
- Headline on screen (phone)
- Before: 6.2 sAfter: 1.1 s
- JavaScript on first load
- Before: 1.8 MBAfter: 240 kB
- Readers who leave before it loads
- Before: 31%After: 7%
Materials
- React
- Vite
- TypeScript
