By Robert Castley

Throughout September, the response times and the success rates of the social networking sites were particularly impressive with an average response time of 1.79 seconds and average availability of 99.79% for the month. Facebook was the top performing site in both categories with a load time of 0.59 seconds and an almost perfect score for availability with an average of 99.99%.

Hi5, Bebo, Friends Reunited, Twitter and WAYN made up the bottom five in both measurements with Bebo struggling with its response time with an average of 4.68 seconds.

With the new Facebook Timeline feature coming in to play, it will be interesting to see how Facebook’s performance holds up over the next couple of months as the feature is rolled out. As it stands, Facebook is continuing to set the standard in terms of performance, both on desktop sites as well as on its mobile site. For the week of September 19th, Facebook’s mobile site had an average response time of 3.02 seconds and average availability of 85.14%, both of which are impressive for a mobile web page.

About the author

Robert Castley has been solutions consultant at Keynote for over two years. Prior to working at Keynote, Robert worked as a Professional Services Consultant at a document management company, Macro 4, where he worked on developing custom web interfaces. Robert is passionate about web performance and optimisation and has over 10 years of web development experience. One of his proudest achievements is developing one of the world’s most popular Open Source Content Management Systems to the masses – Mambo, which now lives on as Joomla!

Robert has a BTEC National Diploma in Computer Studies.

About the company

Keynote Systems is a global leader in Internet and mobile cloud monitoring. It provides companies with solutions for continuously improving the online experience. Founded in 1995, Keynote provides testing, monitoring and measurement products and services for any enterprise including online portals, e-commerce sites, B2B sites, mobile operators and mobile infrastructure providers. Keynote products and services help companies improve customer experience in four areas: Web performance, mobile quality, streaming and real user experience testing.