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Comment by acconrad | Hacker News Reader

That's pretty sad. The worst part is they just mentioned that they sped up the homepage by 75%, which is really irrelevant for a site that isn't technically focused like Google. They're trying to appeal to the wrong crowd.

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I think there may be a bit of confusion here, as the recent post about the increased number of daily stories on Digg's frontpage was written by a Digg user and posted to their blog, not written by Digg staff or otherwise endorsed by us. (I work at Digg.) Our last blog post was yesterday ( http://about.digg.com/blog/how-get-started-digg-filtering-my... ) and about a couple of new features we rolled out.

Your comment seems to imply that they sped up the time it takes to load the homepage by 75%, which is not the case. That figure was a in reference to how frequently a new story hits the homepage.

Well it is the case, just not what's being trumpeted in the latest press release. v4 was supposed to speed up page load significantly, that's why they added the little page load timer at the bottom of the page.

"For a site that isn't technically focused like Google"

A 400ms improvement in page load time at Yahoo directly increased page views by 12%

Although Digg isn't actually speeding up their page serving, you should note that page speed is one of the cornerstones of conversion rate optimization.

Google will even penalize slower sites in SEO rankings. Page speed is about the easiest way to improve engagement and conversion rate with modern CDNs etc:

http://www.webperformancetoday.com/2010/07/01/the-best-graph...

http://conversionvoodoo.com/blog/2010/04/official-google-new...

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