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August 12 2008
Top e-tailers score at the bottom of website performance test
The ecommerce sites that score highest for performance are from retailers that don't have a big online presence — and the most web-reliant retailers score lowest...
Matalan, Vision Express, DFS, Morrisons and Tesco Direct are the top scorers in the latest Sitemorse site performance test, but many of the big names online are at the bottom of the ratings.
The bottom fifteen, says Sitemorse founder Lawrence Shaw, includes Dixons, Amazon, Endless, HMV, Maplin Electronics, Play.com, as well as mobile phone companies Orange and Phones 4u. "If the table was reversed then it would make more sense," he suggests.
Sitemorse tests and rates website performance on basic issues such as broken links, missing images, the inclusion of titles on pages for search engine optimisation and accessibility:
This is why each month there are some major movements in the table. One of the biggest climbers in July was Holland & Barrett that moved up 25 places to 17th spot with a score of 5.16 compared with 4.12 last month. Shaw says the company has improved functional aspects of its site such as broken links and it has had a big impact on its performance. It is a similar situation with Goldsmiths that improved the accessibility and functionality of its website and moved up 35 places to 57th spot with a score of 3.30.
The accessibility of sites to visually impaired people continues to be an issue for many retailers and probably one of the most surprising poor performers is the Co-op that fails all the accessibility tests. "The Co-op focuses on ethical policies and supporting communities but every page fails the tests, which is not very good," says Shaw.
So, why are some of the most successful ecommerce sites on the internet able to get away with scoring so low? Do performance measures like this not actually matter when it comes to achieving online sales? Is there in fact a real negative trade-off between achieving a high score in this kind of performance measure and commercial success? Going for Double-A accessibility, for instance, does seriously cut down on your design options...
Top scoring retailers