You are here: News / Latest Website Rankings of 100 Retailers

Latest Website Rankings of 100 Retailers

Archived article dated Friday November 30th 2007

After one month off the top spot of the table of the 100 retail websites tested this month Tesco's direct catalogue site direct.tesco.com pushed rival supermarket Morrisons into second spot as it regained its crown.

The comprehensive list of 100 sites, which includes not only the largest players but also some of the smaller specialist online merchants, has been created by The Retail Bulletin and specialist website testing company SiteMorse that used its automated testing of the first 125 pages of each retailer’s site to generate a ranked table.

Lawrence Shaw, founder of SiteMorse, says the Tesco site last month suffered from broken links but these have now been fixed and it has jumped 17 places back to the top of the table with a score of 8.12 out of 10 compared with 5.5 last month. “This demonstrates that it is not rocket science to keep a good website. It just takes good housekeeping to fix it,” he says.

Not doing so well is DSG Group, with its Dixons, Curry’s and PC World sites all performing particularly badly for a group that sells technology. Dixons stands at 83 in the table while PC World and Curry’s prop up the bottom of the table in the bottom two spots.

Shaw says one of the big problems with these sites is that the links that connect them to each other are broken so it is not possible to move from Dixons to PC World via the website links. He says this raises questions about the overall quality of these sites, especially for the Dixons website which only has an online presence and no physical stores.

Adding to its woes is the fact that 53 per cent of its pages do not have the keywords present for search engines to pick up on. And every page fails the accessibility test that checks whether the site is usable by visually impaired people.

Although House of Fraser also fails badly on the accessibility test it has still managed to perform very well this month – having moved up 24 places with a score of 7.44 compared with 4.52 last month. This follows its jump of 21 places last month. “It’s a good score and represents a big improvement. The only thing that it now fails on is the accessibility test,” says Shaw.

Breaking its score down, it achieves a maximum 10 for functionality, eight out of 10 for code quality, and eight out of 10 for performance. This means that had it sorted out its accessibility and improved its score from zero out of 10 to nearer nine out of 10 then House of Fraser would have topped the table. To improve this situation Shaw says that simply adding ALT tags onto images (to provide a textual description) would make a big difference.

Another disappointment this month was the number of sites that have been excluded as a result of them either been ‘down’ at the time of testing or because of their reliance on ‘assistive’ technology, which SiteMorse believes breaks the general “rules of accessibility” of internet sites. Whereas last month Gap was the only exclusion, this month it has been joined by Pets at Home and more surprisingly the heavyweight retailer Boots.

By Glynn Davis

Tagged as: website rankings | sitemorse

Text size: A | A | A

Share this article:

• Email to a friend
• Printable version
• PDF version

Should your colleagues be reading the Retail Bulletin?
Let them know about us.

• Home page
• News
• Legal
• City and Corporate
• Property
• Responsible Retailing
• Brands
• Economic news
• Technology
• Events
• Share Prices
• Retail jobs
• Retail Suppliers Guide
• Retail Conferences
• People In Retail Awards 2008
• bssa

• District Retail Manager - Luxury Brand – London, & NW England c£50K £50,000
• Merchandiser £55,000
• Store Manager £46,000
• Regional Manager in Training - Supermarket Chain - West Kent £50,000

• More retail jobs

• Suppliers guide
• List your company