A startup called Aptimize is hoping to drum up some attention today for its website acceleration products by showing that even Fortune 500 companies -- who should have the resources to do better -- sometimes have ridiculously slow sites.
Aptimize has run tests across the Fortune 500 and created a list of the slowest sites, which you can see below. Even if a company isn't on the slow list, it might still want to check how it stacks up against average times among the companies:
- First view load time (domestic): 7.066 seconds
- First view load time (international): 9.462 seconds
- Repeat view load time: 3.970 seconds
- Start render time: 2.960 seconds
The company is based in New Zealand, and chief executive Ed Robinson said it first built this software for internal use, back when it was focused on a project management web application and wanted to increase the speed of its own website.
Aptimize's most prominent customer so far is Microsoft, which used the tools to improve the speed of its SharePoint website. The company says its software reduced the SharePoint site's domestic load times by 43 percent (to 5.9 seconds) and international load times by 54 percent (to 6.1 seconds). In fact, Robinson said about half of Aptimize's customers are websites built on Sharepoint, which is why it's announcing a SharePoint-specific product today.
Competitors include Aragon Networks, FastWeb, and StrangeLoops, but Robinson said Aptimize is one of the early pioneers in this industry and has the advantage of simplicity and speed -- customers install it on their servers, and their websites speed up in a matter of hours. Aptimize doesn't have software for websites that run on cloud-based infrastructure yet, but Robinson said he plans to make deals with cloud hosting companies to add support for cloud-based startups soon.
