By Robert Castley

Keynote Systems has monitored the performance of top retail sites from Australia, France, Germany, Japan, Sweden, UK and USA throughout June. The results are below.

The UK sites performed well in the download speed category, with Next, Marks and Spencer, Tesco and John Lewis all ranking in the top half of the index, each with load times of less than eight seconds. Next’s mobile site was the fastest of the UK sites monitored, coming in second place overall with an average download time of 5.02 seconds for June.

Overall, the sites from Germany, the USA and the UK outperformed the sites from Australia, France, Japan and Sweden for download speed. However for availability, the Swedish sites made up four of the top five, with Swedish site Ellos achieving 100% average availability for June. The British retailers did not perform well compared to other countries in terms of availability with all sites scoring in the lower half of the index. Tesco came in 17th place overall with an average availability of only 97.76%. John Lewis was the best performing UK site this month with a 98.66% success rate.

All of the UK sites monitored had lower availability rates in June than they did in May this year. As more and more people use their mobiles as the first port of call when it comes to shopping online, retailers should really be seeking to improve the performance of their mobile site if they hope to profit from the growing trend of m-commerce. While having a quick mobile site is extremely important if retailers wish to retain customers and encourage return site visits, they must also ensure that visitors are able to access their site from their mobile device, regardless of the handset they use or the network they’re on.

The mobile sites of these retailers were measured using a webkit based smart phone browser every hour from London, Nürnberg, Paris, San Francisco, New York, Stolkholm, Sydney and Tokyo.

Real-time measurement of mobile site performance can help retailers to understand exactly what their mobile customers are experiencing when they visit their site. If a customer is unable to access the information they are looking for, it’s likely that they’ll browse away from that retailer to try again elsewhere. The improved functionality of smartphones has led to consumers expecting the same performance on their phones as they do from their computers. If retailers want to stay ahead of the competition, it’s essential that they are able to spot any mobile performance issues as soon as they happen, before they affect their end-users and potential customers.

About the author

Robert Castley is Lead Solutions Consultant at Keynote Systems. 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 the 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.