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May Website Rankings of 100 Retailers

Archived article dated Wednesday June 4th 2008

In a surprising move Clinton Cards moved up three places to take the top slot as the best performing website in the table of the 100 retail websites tested this month for The Retail Bulletin.

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.

Clinton Cards scored a credible 7.88 out of 10 to edge out Tesco Direct with 7.86 and DFS with 7.74 as the top retailer for May, which Lawrence Shaw, founder of Sitemorse, believes highlights how the sites at the top of the table are scoring better today than when testing began 18 months ago.

“It’s good to see and shows that retailers are taking accessibility [for visually impaired people] and site performance more seriously. It’s a shame therefore that those at the bottom of the table are still scoring very poorly,” he says.

He cites the likes of Endless, Maplin, Dixons and Amazon as all technology or online-focused companies that are among the worst performing sites. “Of the bottom 10 sites 70 per cent are online businesses, which is strange, why is this?” he asks.

By far the best performance this month came from Matalan, which moved up 72 places to sixth spot with a score of 7.01. This represents a significant improvement on its previous score of only 2.05.

Shaw says that this is surprising because just like DFS and Vision Express, which are also placed at the top of the table, it is not the sort of company that you would expect to have one of the best websites.

“The perception would be for Firebox, Amazon, Tesco Direct and Carphone Warehouse to be at the top because they are either pure plays or have a reputation for good service. But not all of them are at the top end. A number of pure plays are scoring two or three out of 10 each month which is dreadful,” he says.

Part of the performance testing by Sitemorse involves measuring the downloading times of each websites’ home pages. The optimum size to download on an ADSL line is 200KB as this should fully load in an acceptable six seconds. However, the average for the 100 retailers tested was 363KB with 39 per cent of sites therefore failing to load within this timeframe.

Shaw highlights the Virgin site as taking three times the benchmark for its home page to load. And Mothercare fares equally badly: “If you are using a modem or a PDA to download then its site could take up to six minutes to load up.”

Part of the problem is that many sites have particularly large home pages because within retail organisations there is frequently a battle between the e-commerce departments and the marketing teams. “Marketing wants lots on the home page while the e-commerce teams try to impose limits but they are losing the battle. These things should be considered when creating a site because if the home page does not load then customers leave and go elsewhere,” explains Shaw.

For yet another month it has not been possible to score and rank the sites of Gap and Boots. They continue to be excluded from the table as a result of them either being ‘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.

By Glynn Davis

About Sitemorse

Sitemorse checks compliance, measures performance and tests function of your websites, by reading content, checking code and reviewing infrastructure to reduce risk caused by on-line failure. From single page monitoring to a complete site review, Sitemorse provides both management summaries and detailed technical reports (down to the line in the code).

Tagged as: website testing | sitemorse | website ranking

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