Today I had some spare time to look at GOG’s new design because there’s been quite a few complaints about it’s being slow so I did an audit run on the main page once the sale ended. These tests are made with Lighthouse auditing for web developers, simulated on a fast 3G connection.

Lighthouse can be downloaded at https://developers.google.com/web/tools/lighthouse/

Auditing Score
Performance: 33 / 100
Progressive Web App: 27 / 100
Accessibility: 52 / 100
Best Practices: 87 / 100
SEO: 100 / 100

Performance
First Contentful Paint: 2,520 ms
Speed Index: 16,930 ms
Time to Interactive: 24,460 ms
First Meaningful Paint: 3,870 ms
First CPU Idle: 3,870 ms
Estimated Input Latency: 510 ms (50 ms or less is recommended)
Uses an excessive DOM size: 6,041 nodes (1,500 nodes or less is recommended)
Has enormous network payloads: 7,767 KB (1,600 KB or less is recommended)
Has significant main thread work: 7,210 ms
Uses inefficient cache policy on static assets: 29 assets found
JavaScript boot-up time is too high: 2,670 ms
Critical Request Chains: 21 chains found
Page load is not fast enough on 3G: Interactive at 24 s (10 seconds or less is recommended)
Content is not sized correctly for the viewport (page may not work correctly on mobile devices)

Accessibility & Best Practices
Image elements do not have ALT attributes
Buttons do not have an accessible name
Links do not have a discernible name
Background and foreground colors do not have a sufficient contrast ratio
ID attributes on the page are not unique
Does not use passive listeners to improve scrolling performance
Links to cross-origin destinations are unsafe

I don't know how accurate those figures are but It doesn't look too hot.

They seem accurate to me, it varies some (less than a sec difference) from my tests. It's a simulation of a 3G connection so might be better or worse for those that actually have that kind of speed. There's also at least one JavaScript file that's over 1 MB in size, don't know what that does but seems huge to me.

You would need the originals to glean any thoughts on this, no?

It holds most of the site data in JSON format. Then, various javascript functions parse these elements and populate them in various places on the page.

There's very little actual page content that is generated on the server (you can convince yourself of that by installing NoScript), and I'm guessing a lot of the performance indicators will depend on what browser you are using and the overall processing power of the client device.

I find that a bit annoying that they rely so much on Javascript, it's often the cause of slow websites and disabling Javascript pretty much breaks this site but it sure loads fast. The tests are throttling the CPU for the simulation, it won't be 100% accurate but it's an indication that there could be an issue with the performance. It could be caching, something in the code and so on. If I were them I would definitely look into this just to be sure nothing is overlooked.

Where you see a slow website, they see low server usage :). Yeah... they don't do that here :).

It's more of a: "Does the site work? Yes. Does it crash? No. OK, all good then" kind of place.

Strange,I mean the javascript thing as I refuse to acknowledge or let it near my pc.I can remember many sites stating ''we use javascript'' and wanting to install it so all I did was close the site and look somewhere else.

I really hate those websites and usually avoid them altogether. Northing is worse than coming to a website and not seeing anything because you haven't granted it any permission in NoScript.