Northline, 2023
Northline Travel
Northline publish long-form travel writing with enormous photographs, and most of their readers are on mobile data somewhere far from a tower. Beauty had to survive bandwidth.
- Client
- Northline
- Year
- 2023
- Discipline
- Content platform
- Duration
- 9 weeks
- Role
- Frontend, CMS architecture, Performance
- 14MB → 1.1MB
- Median article weight
- +2m 40s
- Median time on page
- −71%
- Bounce rate on 3G
- 7
- Derivatives per upload
The previous site averaged 14MB per article. Readers abroad simply left. Editors, meanwhile, were resizing images by hand before every publish.
How the work was actually done.
Three decisions that shaped the outcome more than anything else on the project.
- 01
Make the fast path the default path
Every upload is derived into AVIF and WebP at seven widths, with blur placeholders generated at build time. Editors upload the original and never think about it again.
- 02
Respect the reader's connection
Below-the-fold imagery defers until intent is shown. On a slow link the article text is complete and readable long before the photographs finish arriving.
- 03
Give the words room
A single column, a 66-character measure, and typographic scale that holds from 320px to 2560px. Photography interrupts the reading rhythm deliberately, never accidentally.
Article weight fell by more than ninety percent, and time-on-page rose sharply in exactly the markets that had been bouncing.
Building something like Northline Travel?
Tell me where you are: an idea, a half-finished build, or a product that has outgrown its foundations. The first conversation is free and usually clarifies more than it costs.
- info@angelmaile.com
- Phone
- +27 (0) 71 000 0000
- Studio
- Studio 04, Bree Street, Cape Town
- Hours
- Mon – Fri, 08:30 – 17:30 · SAST (UTC+2)
Replies within one business day. Cape Town, South Africa, SAST (UTC+2).