Washington Post readies the launch of its new 'lightning fast' mobile site

Shailesh Prakash, chief technology officer for the Post, said the goal was to “create the fastest mobile news site possible”.

“A lot of publishers have spent time making their apps very fast, but the mobile web is where the growth is. It’s where the action is.”

The decision to focus on strengthening the mobile site is unsurprising given the performance of the Post’s mobile site, which far outstrips that of its app. According to Prakash, 70 per cent of the publisher’s traffic comes from mobile, 63 per cent of which use the website and just 7 per cent on the app.

Early testing for the new superfast site has highlighted the benefits of the improvements with users accessing five times more pages than they did on the current version. From tomorrow, around 10 per cent of the mobile traffic will be directed to the new version , which will replace the current site entirely by the end of the year.

Advertisers will not have to make any changes either after the Post’s chief revenue officer, Jed Hartman, said that the company’s engineers were able to ensure ads would not slow down the experience significantly.

With the majority of traffic coming from mobile, often through cellular data, mobile speed has become an increasingly important differentiator for business. As a result, Google and Facebook have been encouraging publishers to speed up their sites to keep consumers from navigating elsewhere which would subsequently harm their advertising revenue.

Pressure from technology groups has at times irked some publishers. The Guardian's former editor in chief, Alan Rusbridger, recently accused Facebook of hoovering up nearly $27m of the Guardian's digital advertising revenue last year.