Vanguard website troubles

Since Vanguard redesigned the website a little while ago, it has been acting very slow. The site runs extremely slow in Internet Explorer and sometimes it hangs for me. I notice that every time I go to the funds page listed in the screenshot below, my CPU spikes 100% for about 10 seconds and sometimes I have to close my Internet Explorer and start all over again. I have to say that Firefox and Google Chrome work a little better. But, I am not writing about IE vs. Firefox and Chrome here. I am writing about the Vanguard here.

Vanguard is a provider of low cost index funds. Vanguard is all about simplifying the investing process. Vanguard is simple and straightforward. Vanguard's funds are simple and straightforward. Their website needs to be simple. But it is not. Since the last website update, it has been a pain going to their website.

Look at the screenshot below. I filtered how much JavaScript gets loaded on the funds page. 153 KB!!!!. My browser loads 153KB of JavaScript just to show me my daily fund prices. This is too much. Where is the low cost solution for this? It should be 15KB or less, not 153KB. This much bandwidth must be costing a lot of money.


I also filtered for the total CSS that comes thru. It is 48 KB.

So, a total of about 200KB of unnecessary (not really necessary) "stuff" comes over the wire when I go to check my fund prices. This is the reason site is too slow.

Update: I looked into this some more and I see that some of JavaScript files are not even minified. The minified JavaScript should speed up the page a little and can save some bandwidth.

posted by Me, on Friday, March 06, 2009 at 11:20 PM

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