The UK has produced a generally consistent improvement in app and web performance on last year, whereas the US has blown hot and cold performance-wise; when sites are good, they’re very good, but when bad, they’re terrible.
So finds the Apica Web Performance Index, which suggests that UK retailers held up really well this year.
In fact, Apica found that 75% of UK e-tailers maintained or improved their website and app performance compared to last year during 2017’s Black Friday sales rush. This is compared to just 56% in the US.
In the US, the index found that two thirds of companies failed to load their sites within the 10 second window which research has shown leads to 40% of potential consumers taking their trade elsewhere. In the UK, fewer than 1 in 10 (8%) companies fell foul of this marker.
While the index found that the worst performing UK sites averaged a poor 18.9 second load time on Black Friday, in the US things were twice as bad, with the worst performing American sites averaging 37.9 seconds to fully load.
However, things aren’t all bad Stateside… According to the index, top-performing US sites outshone their UK cousins. The top 10 US sites averaged just 1.3 seconds to load, whereas in the UK that figure was 2.09 seconds.
And the Apica index highlighted some UK site outages, with 5% of sites experiencing load delays of between 2 minutes and 2 hours on Black Friday itself – the top 100 US sites didn’t experience any.
