By Robert Castley

While there weren’t major changes in the order of the site load speeds this month, the average response time for the whole index dropped by over half a second – the average time for September was 1.79 seconds compared to 2.47 for October. Hi5 and Bebo continued to struggle the most with response times, as the Bebo homepage took an average of almost five seconds to load.

Facebook was once again the quickest site this month, with an average load time of 0.58 seconds and it also came joint top in the availability index. Along with YouTube and MySpace, Facebook achieved a 99.99% success rate for the month, making it October’s top performing site. This is particularly impressive given the changes to Facebook’s format over the past couple of months. Despite modifications to Facebook’s main site and it’s mobile offering, developers have continue to ensure reliable performance for the site’s UK users – which statistics show make up over half of the UK’s population.

Hi5, Twitter and Flickr all ranked below the index average on both measurements, suggesting that these sites have a fair amount of work to do in optimising their websites if they wish to keep up with the competition.

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.