Site Performance Update - Our New Front Page, Editor Issues Resolved
This afternoon we're happy to announce that we've shipped two site updates to help push faster content to you, increase front page performance, and fix an outstanding issue with our editor.
This is the first update we're making to improve front-end performance on the site and we will have another update coming soon.
Our New Front Page
Long end of day recap style news posts no more! We're going to be posting content on the homepage more frequently and have changed the layout to let you see an overview of the most recent topics much easier!
- Faster News - Minor news that we would normally hold off on until the evening will be posted as soon as it's available.
- Faster Load Times - Less data transfer means you're waiting less time for the page to finish rendering!
- A huge win for those on mobile who have had issues visiting the site in the past.
- No more front page video embeds which were causing browser slowdowns - go to the post itself to see them.
- Class Popularity?! - A quick overview pie (mmm.. pie) which shows the class distribution of decks created on our site over the past two weeks.
- Latest Deck Comments - Find decks that people are talking about right now.
Editor Issues Resolved
Many users have experienced issues with our text editor on the forums which would cause the browser to lag / delay when typing. We've narrowed down the issue and gotten it patched up. If you were experiencing issues before, why not try responding to this news post to check it out?
What's Next?
In our next site front-end performance update, we're targeting JavaScript and the way it loads on the site.
- We've already deployed this update to our sister-site, OverPwn.
- We're currently testing this update on our development HearthPwn site.
- Once we're done testing and are certain it is solid, we'll push it live.
Comment.
I don't find this update to be faster at all. And probably the WORST part of this is that it is a giant CLICK BAIT.
"Designing Cards for Hearthstone's Future Iksar, one of Hearthstone's Game Designers, has asked what the community wants to see from future card sets! So, what exactly do we want to see?"
I don't know, why don't you tell me without me having to click through?
wow all articles are like a click bait now. never noticed
It's almost like they're trying to publish original content without paying for journalists and writers to actually produce original content, isn't it? Same old story all over the web, but it can be even worse among gaming sites.
Site loads much faster now. Thanks!
site loads the same
There's room for improvement (news layout could look better) but I like the idea, the homepage loads much faster now. Don't know where all the hate is coming from.
Wow, the new homepage sucks.
After not being on this site for a bit the front page was a surprise.
guys , stop complaining, the update is alright
You really should be doing something about BaBa Ji and his 15 pages of spam every day on the forums
As your sites content is not that dynamic, I would have tried caching a lot of the homepage content before going with something as drastic as this.
You're right
Who says we don't cache front page content already? The site itself is heavily cached, which has actually lead to more problems than anything if you ask me (fun vote related bugs!)
One of the big issues we had with the old homepage is how much content there could be on it that users would have to download or get hit with. Anytime we would have 3 or more videos on the page it took a massive hit to performance.
There are other things we could have done, but we liked this idea to go forward with as it will help us move news along at a quicker pace and keep people more up to date with stuff that is happening. We'll also soon be increasing the number of posts on the homepage by a few so that it is easier to get a glimpse of what has happened in the past few days.
Appreciate attempts to make things faster. We'll see what it looks like after round 2. Maybe the last article could be displayed in full, at least on an alternate home page for regular visitors?
For "class popularity" I would rather see decks played than decks created. Maybe innkeeper can collect that sort of data?
You guys need to come to terms with the fact that you've created a Frankenstein-esque monster of a website, with all these third-party APIs, social integration, shoddy CDN and Curse framework. I know there's no point in just complaining, but you guys should really just admit that things got out-of-hand and the APIs and other bloated junk kept piling up since the website's launch.
Yeah, mobile delivery is better, but I'm guessing the majority of Hearthpwn traffic is still desktop. Why don't you guys just admit that you messed up, get the team together to streamline the website and remove a lot of these dumb APIs and analytic junk? Then optimize the website according to modern standards, as opposed to how sites used to be built back when the Web 2.0 was new and everyone was was piling on tons of useless junk, before they figured out their websites became so bloated that users couldn't load them properly?
Hopefully the analytics will show how bad this idea was.
While I agree wholeheartedly it's ugly as sin, their original site's load times were beyond abominable.
They could load via Ajax like facebook. They solved a problem and created another much worse.