Rebel Insights

A Modern Story of Web Performance From RebelMouse Founder + CEO Andrea Breanna

A Modern Story of Web Performance From RebelMouse Founder + CEO Andrea Breanna

If I had more time, this website would have loaded faster

In the first months of 2020, we've focused at RebelMouse on page speed and performance. We worked very hard and found ways to take 90% of the sites we power to 90+ performance scores via Google's PageSpeed Insights tool — even with sites that are loaded with ads, embeds, third-party analytics, and other typical slow-loading elements. You can read more about our victories here.

A few months after we started this process, COVID-19 hit the world very hard. Suddenly, every media company was faced with a huge problem: Advertising fell off a cliff in what seemed like seconds. The only way to survive this unprecedented downturn is to grow traffic and control costs at the same time. So we started to shave our code and made our websites faster. We dropped costs just as dramatically as we were increasing scores.

Here are some surprises we found when doing this: If you want truly exceptional performance, none of the JavaScript and CSS frameworks that developers love so much make the cut. We thought the React version of RebelMouse was going to be the huge page speed breakthrough, until we realized the only way to achieve this goal was to write the code carefully and refactor it endlessly until it was as short as possible. As any author will tell you, like editing a book or a blog post, the revision process is never really done. By stepping away from frameworks, and methodically shaving vanilla code, our customers continue to see major improvements in performance.

As we announced this to our site network and rolled it out publicly, many of our clients asked me personally, "How did you do it?" The answer is easy to understand regardless of how technical you may be. It's perfectly summarized in this wonderful quote attributed to Mark Twain:

"If I had more time, I would have written a shorter letter."
—Blaise Pascal, 1657(and later, more famously Mark Twain)

The universe is sometimes very beautiful, and especially when you keep it simple. If you would like to start publishing on a site optimized for both speed and sustainability, request a proposal and let's start working together.

What Is RebelMouse?
Request a Proposal

Where 
Websites Are Built

The Fastest Sites in the World Run on RebelMouse

Let’s Chat

new!

RebelMouse Performance Monitoring

Real-Time Core Web Vitals

Get Started
DISCOVER MORE

Our Core Features

Our platform is a complete digital publishing toolbox that's built for modern-day content creators, and includes game-changing features such as our:

animate
Layout and Design toolLayout and Design tool on mobile
animate

Why RebelMouse?

Unprecedented Scale

RebelMouse sites reach more than 120M people a month, with an always-modern solution that combines cutting-edge technology with decades of media savvy. And due to our massive scale, 1 in 3 Americans have visited a website powered by RebelMouse.

120M+ Users
550M+ Pageviews
17+ Avg. Minutes per User
6+ Avg. Pages per User

Today's Top Websites Use RebelMouse

Thanks to the tremendous scale of our network, we are able to analyze a wealth of traffic data that informs our strategies and allows us to be a true strategic partner instead of just a vendor.

upworthyindy100Vault12No Film SchoolRawStoryResponsible StatecraftPrideMNI Market NewsPremierGuitarPenskeINN Educate Brand ConnectThe FulcrumGZEROOkayafricaBrit+CoPaper MagazinePowerToFlyNarcityCommonDreamsAllBusiness

What Clients Say

We’re here to help you weigh and understand every tech and strategic decision that affects your digital presence. Spend less time managing everything yourself, and more time focused on creating the quality content your users deserve.

Case Studies

A Team Built Like No Other

RebelMouse employs a unique, diverse, and decentralized team that consists of 70+ digital traffic experts across more than 25 different countries. We have no central office, and we cover every time zone to ensure that we’re able to deliver amazing results and enterprise-grade support around the clock.

Our team is well-versed in all things product, content, traffic, and revenue, and we strategically deploy ourselves to help with each element across all of our clients. We thrive on solving the complex.

Let's Chat