More Than 1 in 4 News Websites Jump Around While They Load
Across 2,519 news websites in Diib's data, 28% scored above Google's 0.1 limit for layout shift, meaning text and buttons visibly move while the page loads. Across all websites Diib tracks, it's 19%.
If you run a news or publishing site, a jumpy page is more common in your industry than almost anywhere else, so readers may already expect it and still find it frustrating. Getting under 0.1 puts you ahead of more than a quarter of news sites. Most fixes involve reserving space on the page rather than removing ads.
You start reading a headline, an ad loads above it, and the story drops halfway down the screen. Diib’s data shows that happens on news websites more often than almost anywhere else.
The measure here is Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS): a score for how much the content on a page moves around while it loads. It isn’t measured in seconds. Google calls 0.1 or less good and anything over 0.25 poor.
What the data shows
- Over the limit. Across 2,519 news websites, 28% scored above 0.1, against 19% of the roughly 239,000 websites Diib tracks.
- Poor. 17% of news sites scored above 0.25, nearly twice the 10% rate across all sites.
- Typical site. The median news site still scored well inside the limit, at 0.009. The problem is concentrated in a large minority of sites, not spread across all of them.
What this does and doesn’t tell you
These figures come from the most recent automated mobile speed test of each website Diib tracks in the 60 days to October 22, 2026, counting one site per domain. They’re lab test results, so real visitors may see more or less movement. The data doesn’t show why news sites shift more, or how many readers leave because of it.
The usual causes are well known, though: ads and embedded videos that load after the text, images without a set size, and cookie or subscription banners that push content down. News pages tend to carry more of all three than the typical small business site.
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