Trump Triumphs In 4G Mobile and Website Performance
September 21, 2015

Peter Kacandes
AppDynamics

Share this

Trump’s website performance before, during, and after the second Republican presidential debates on CNN continued to solidly outpace his opponents with sub-five second response times on both mobile and desktop.

Donald Trump, whose debate responses some pundits called “lightweight,” has a website that is consistently lightweight as well, but that contributes to its frontrunner status, performance-wise, so in that respect it’s a winning strategy. Weighing in at just about one megabyte, the Trump site is loading on desktops consistently in less than three seconds, and on 4G in just over four seconds, both well ahead of the rest of the candidates.

All eyes were also on Carly Fiorina to see how she performed after moving up from the undercard to primetime. While some headlines say she “crushed” it, her website performance continued to languish in the bottom third of the Republican candidate pool, with page-load times hovering in the mid-teens on both desktop and 4G.


The candidates’ websites were measured continuously by AppDynamics and summary data was collected the day before the debate and again, during, and immediately following the debate.

The Bush and Christie campaigns repeated a maneuver they used for the first debate, which was to significantly reduce the weight of their home pages so that they would load much faster on debate night, when one would expect a significant spike in traffic. The “Jeb 2016” site loaded more than twice as fast on debate night, and the Christie site shaved more than 40 percent off its load time.

The Bush and Christie campaigns are being very strategic in how they manage their sites for performance. Making those changes for debate night to speed up their sites is a smart move in anticipation of a lot of new traffic. Those new visitors are going to have a good experience, performance-wise. It’s a trade-off, though, because you want a rich content experience, too. Between the debates, they went back to their heavier pages — which in the case of Bush, was more than four times the debate night weight — 8.3 megabytes versus 2.0. That’s a huge difference.

When you look at all the candidates’ website performance, as a group their end-user response time is not all that impressive, but that can be deceptive. In most cases, their ‘time to first render’ is acceptable. Fiorina’s site, for example, has a first-render time on desktop of 3.4 seconds, which most users would consider acceptable.

Here is how the websites performed on average before the debate, measured on Tuesday, 9/15, and then during and immediately following the debate:


AppDynamics measured the ten candidates’ websites from two locations, one on the East Coast and one on the West Coast, using the Google Chrome web browser. While the actual experience of end users varies due to a variety of factors, the synthetic measurements that AppDynamics provides offer an accurate, relative ranking of the performance of the candidates’ websites.

Peter Kacandes is Senior Technical Marketing Manager of Mobile, Web, and Synthetics at AppDynamics.

Share this

The Latest

November 21, 2024

Broad proliferation of cloud infrastructure combined with continued support for remote workers is driving increased complexity and visibility challenges for network operations teams, according to new research conducted by Dimensional Research and sponsored by Broadcom ...

November 20, 2024

New research from ServiceNow and ThoughtLab reveals that less than 30% of banks feel their transformation efforts are meeting evolving customer digital needs. Additionally, 52% say they must revamp their strategy to counter competition from outside the sector. Adapting to these challenges isn't just about staying competitive — it's about staying in business ...

November 19, 2024

Leaders in the financial services sector are bullish on AI, with 95% of business and IT decision makers saying that AI is a top C-Suite priority, and 96% of respondents believing it provides their business a competitive advantage, according to Riverbed's Global AI and Digital Experience Survey ...

November 18, 2024

SLOs have long been a staple for DevOps teams to monitor the health of their applications and infrastructure ... Now, as digital trends have shifted, more and more teams are looking to adapt this model for the mobile environment. This, however, is not without its challenges ...

November 14, 2024

Modernizing IT infrastructure has become essential for organizations striving to remain competitive. This modernization extends beyond merely upgrading hardware or software; it involves strategically leveraging new technologies like AI and cloud computing to enhance operational efficiency, increase data accessibility, and improve the end-user experience ...

November 13, 2024

AI sure grew fast in popularity, but are AI apps any good? ... If companies are going to keep integrating AI applications into their tech stack at the rate they are, then they need to be aware of AI's limitations. More importantly, they need to evolve their testing regiment ...

November 12, 2024

If you were lucky, you found out about the massive CrowdStrike/Microsoft outage last July by reading about it over coffee. Those less fortunate were awoken hours earlier by frantic calls from work ... Whether you were directly affected or not, there's an important lesson: all organizations should be conducting in-depth reviews of testing and change management ...

November 08, 2024

In MEAN TIME TO INSIGHT Episode 11, Shamus McGillicuddy, VP of Research, Network Infrastructure and Operations, at EMA discusses Secure Access Service Edge (SASE) ...

November 07, 2024

On average, only 48% of digital initiatives enterprise-wide meet or exceed their business outcome targets according to Gartner's annual global survey of CIOs and technology executives ...

November 06, 2024

Artificial intelligence (AI) is rapidly reshaping industries around the world. From optimizing business processes to unlocking new levels of innovation, AI is a critical driver of success for modern enterprises. As a result, business leaders — from DevOps engineers to CTOs — are under pressure to incorporate AI into their workflows to stay competitive. But the question isn't whether AI should be adopted — it's how ...