UK retailers are leading the pack when it comes to fast, mobile optimised sites, finds
Keynote Systems, an Internet and mobile cloud monitoring company, that tracks the mobile site performance of 17 of the top retailers across five countries. UK sites monitored excelled in the download speed category with Tesco, Next, Marks and Spencer and John Lewis all ranking in the top seven, each with load times of less than seven seconds.
Tesco’s UK mobile site was the fastest site monitored with an average download time of 4.39 seconds for this week – as M-Retailing also discovered in its tests in March with Gomez. The Swedish sites monitored struggled the most this week in terms of speed, with all of the sites monitored ranking towards the bottom of the table.
Ellos had the slowest download time this week with an average of 34.77 seconds however a major contributing factor to this slow speed is because the Ellos site hasn’t been optimised for mobile. All of the sites monitored in Sweden were in fact the main web pages, with vast amounts of data to download, as no mobile sites exist for these major outlets. . This highlights the importance of retailers offering a dedicated mobile site, to ensure improved performance and usability to encourage transactions from mobiles
Only one of the mobile sites monitored achieved 100% availability this week and this was the Australian site Myer. Marks and Spencer was the best performing UK mobile site in fifth place, with 98.07% availability. John Lewis had the lowest availability of the UK mobile sites monitored with 96.32%, putting it in 14th place overall.
“Mobile is quickly becoming a key channel for commerce, and it’s time that retailers started paying close attention to the online experience of their mobile customers,” said Robert Castley, Lead Solutions Consultant, Keynote Systems. “While it’s clear that mobile sites still lag some way behind full Internet sites in terms of availability and speed, with mobile devices becoming more and more sophisticated, consumers are beginning to expect a comparable performance on their phones as on their computers. Many customers won’t be happy if they’re made to wait more than ten seconds for a mobile site to load, and they’re likely to navigate away from the site. This will not only result in a loss of custom on that occasion, but site visitors might be dissuaded from visiting the same site in the future.”
