Case Study
National World is listed on the London Stock Exchange and is a leading UK publishing and digital media business. They provide in-depth journalism, analysis, and opinion pieces, aiming to inform and engage readers across various digital platforms.
Local News Media
corporate.nationalworld.com
Over 134 million average monthly page views
130 titles, including well-known newspapers such as The Scotsman, Edinburgh Evening News, Yorkshire Post and Sunderland
We partnered with National World to streamline their ad loading strategy and third-party integrations for key titles in their portfolio. Our overarching goal was to reduce ad latency, improve load times for critical components, and ensure the overall page experience remained stable. We wanted to deliver change that could be implemented across their ad stack.
“Catch Metrics gives us the path we need to optimise page speed and drive vital new revenue across our portfolio.”
Lisa Kemp
Head of Ad Product, National WorldWe redesigned the way ad tech scripts were loaded, replacing legacy patterns with a more efficient, async-first model. This reduced time-to-interactive and helped preserve Core Web Vitals, and significantly reduced page and ad latency.
We mapped the impact of every third-party script and their interactions with each other, and reprioritised their execution based on business impact and optimal sequencing. By delaying low-value tools and fast-tracking mission-critical ones, we unlocked measurable gains in both revenue performance and engagement.
We ran a deep-dive analysis on monitisation partner performance and uncovered a slow-loading SSP dragging down the whole stack. After benchmarking it we recommended removing and saw ad-related latency improve by over 30%.
We worked with National World over an 8 week period, with performance gains coming in two distinct releases. This agile and iterative approach to optimisation allowed us to tackle bottlenecks in stages, and meant National World maintained stable site functionality at every step.
National World continues to track key performance metrics in real time, enabling quick responses to any emerging issues.
Additional vendor collaboration and fine-tuning remain top priorities to preserve the gains already made.
With scheduled performance reviews, the team ensures improvements remain robust over time.
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