Compuware Gomez announced the best performing web and mobile sites across different industries today based on benchmarks that measure how fast the sites respond to clicks.
In their respective categories, the winners for web performance (web and mobile combined) are: Branch Banking & Trust for financial services, United Health for health, CBS News for media, Newegg and QVC (a tie) for retail, Delta for airlines, Radisson for hotels, JetBlue for mobile travel sites, and the Federal Emergency Management Agency for government.
Web performance is a business issue. Web and mobile sites that are slow to load or have lots of down time hurt customers' experience, satisfaction, and the likelihood they will spend time on the site or make a purchase.
Compuware Gomez found a direct correlation between an improvement in page response time and an increase in purchases or page abandonment in two studies. Roughly 32 percent of consumers will abandon a web site if it takes more than 5 seconds to load. When page load time improves from 8 seconds to 2 seconds, users are 74 percent more likely to buy something, according to Compuware Gomez.
It's no surprise that big brands have the fastest web sites, as they have money to spend on the infrastructure to make it happen. But in retail, it is interesting that the smaller Newegg beat out Amazon.
The 2010 winners in the retail, financial services, media, travel, healthcare and government categories were measured on response time, availability and consistency.
The Gomez Benchmarks have measured web performance for more than a decade. Today Gomez monitors more than 3,000 web and mobile sites with more than 20 million tests conducted on a network of 150 backbone locations and 150,000 desktop computers.
Mobile performance matters a lot. The majority of mobile phone users expect a mobile web site to load as quickly or faster on a mobile phone compared to a PC at home. By 2014, the number of mobile internet users will outstrip the number of desktop internet users, according to Morgan Stanley.
In financial services, web performance has gotten more important as 75 percent of consumers expect a web site to be up 99 percent of the time or higher. That's a lot higher than the expectation for e-commerce sites, where 47 percent of users expect pages to load in 2 seconds or less. When that doesn't happen, the result is customers moving elsewhere.
The government result is reassuring in once sense. When there's a natural disaster, people will likely go to the FEMA web site for information. And when they do that, they desperately need information. So it's important that the site be up and fast.