www.newyorker.com speed test — 20 Oct 2026

What these numbers mean

• The first byte arrived in 217 ms. That is workable, and the cheapest win left is caching or a warmer connection.
• The page transfers 12.06 MB over 26 request(s). Images files are 99% of it, so resize and recompress the largest images before anything else.
• The HTML itself arrives br-compressed.
• It runs over HTTP/3, so the assets share a connection instead of opening one each.
• 99% of the weight comes from other hosts (analytics, fonts, embeds), which also means their slow day becomes your slow day.
• The largest element painted at 704 ms, inside the 2.5 s Google calls good.
• Layout shift is 0.158 (good is under 0.1): something without a reserved size is loading late - an image, an ad, or a font swap.
• The main thread was blocked for 1.97 s, so taps and scrolling wait while scripts run.

Fix first: Image delivery and format - Serve WebP or AVIF with a JPEG fallback, size images to the space they occupy, and lazy-load anything below the fold. Images are usually more than half of a slow page.

Read on one shared server, not a visitor's phone: use it to compare pages against each other, not as a promise about every connection. We fix what these tests find.