By Robert Castley

Facebook continued to move down the rankings in terms of availability last month – previously Facebook held the top spot for both speed and availability – but in January, it slipped to fourth place in terms of success rate. However, Facebook remained the quickest of the social networking sites measured with an average response time of 0.6 seconds, more than two times faster than the next quickest site.

Bebo struggled in January both with availability and speed. Its average response time was 22.83 seconds, more than 18 seconds slower than the next site, and Bebo was the only site to have an availability score of less than 99%, coming in at 92.66%. Hi5 also struggled with its download speed this month with an average time of 4.29 seconds for the site to load.

While Twitter’s performance has improved somewhat over the past few months, it’s surprising that it continues to be so far down both sets of rankings given the ever-increasing popularity of the site. Along with Friends Reunited, Hi5 and Bebo this month, Twitter should be aiming for a response time of under two seconds on average. Internet and mobile web users are becoming more and more used to optimally performing sites, and so content providers need to be constantly pushing to ensure that they’re offering the best possible site for their members, or they risk losing out to competitors.

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 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.