Must Read: Fantasy Sports Sites Need to be Faster

Most of the fantasy sports world is concerned with one thing: Getting the most accurate analysis and data to the users. What gets lost sometimes is the technical side of the equation: How fast is that information delivered?

Brant Tedeschi, the founder and lead developer for FantasySP, noticed that some of the biggest sites in the fantasy sports world were dragging based on some of the online speed standards, decided to do an analysis, and then posted his findings in an article entitled Fantasy Sports Sites Need to be Faster that takes some folks to task, explains the data, and offers recommendations for improvement.

Up first on Brant's list are four leading content sites in the fantasy sports industry: Rotoworld, Rotowire, KFFL, and RotoInfo. Based on his studies, all four sites suffer from some common (but fixable) latency issues in their load times. Next, Brant takes a look at ESPN and CBS, which have used their technical skills and budgets to effectively make things more efficient. Finally, he takes his own site to task and does a self-analysis on the speed of FantasySP. No surprise, Brant's on top of the speed issue for his own site.

So, what's my take on this? Brant knows what he's talking about. I run through some of these same processes for websites that I develop and every site builder should be analyzing and making decisions based on data like this. If you aren't technical in your role, and terms like CDN, Y!Slow, PageSpeed, cache, CSS sprite, and minify aren't in your vocabulary, you need to make sure your tech guys know the importance of this stuff.

Now, there's no doubt that some website choices are made that impact performance. Case in point: advertising hosting, where ads are served (slowly) by third parties on sites all across the Internet. I've dealt with this problem on sites I run right now, and ad performance is by far the biggest bottleneck we face with site load. Next up are widgets, like Tweet buttons and Facebook social apps. They just add more to the load and don't always do it efficiently. But try to tell your marketing department to get rid of ads and Twitter plug-ins and you might be shown the door.

Regardless, I'll give Brant credit on writing this blog post in a constructive manner. He didn't bash anybody based on his findings; rather, he's trying to educate the industry on ways to improve and that's pretty much in-line with the goals of RotoBiz. Brant's post is definitely an article that should be read by everyone in the fantasy sports industry because speed is a competitive advantage and the big guys are getting it right more often than the smaller guys.

Disclaimer: I don't even use all of the techniques, like CSS sprites, server-level caching, and CDNs on RotoBiz, yet, but it's on the punch list.