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Website testing
It has certainly been a very interesting month online judging by the latest results from the survey of the UK's 15 largest retailers' websites..
It has certainly been a very interesting month online judging by the latest results from the survey of the UK’s 15 largest retailers’ websites, based on analysis undertaken exclusively for The Retail Bulletin, which found B&Q excluded from the testing and Carpetright delivering some pretty shocking figures.
On a brighter note Signet regained the top spot in the table with a respectable score of 7.34 out of 10, based on measurements by specialist website testing company SiteMorse, as it displaced Next, which scored only 5.98 compared with 7.46 last month.
However, under the automated testing of the first 125 pages of their websites (and judged on a variety of criteria before being ranked in the table based on their performance), the real shocks involved B&Q (with its DIY.com website) and Carpetright.
Lawrence Shaw, founder of SiteMorse, says: “The table shows that retailers are now doing updates and making changes to their websites and the effects are now visible. But for B&Q this meant the website was not available on the day we tested it, which is the equivalent of saying that all your high street stores are shut. People then end up shopping with B&Q’s rivals.”
Since the company had only recently overhauled its website Shaw suggests that this failure could have been down to insufficient testing prior to its re-launch. Carpetright also fared badly falling from third place last month to eleventh with score of only 1.5 against 5.5 last month.
This was a result of it not only clocking up 127 errors – with many broken links on its pages and email addresses that do not work – but also delivering a 95.8 per cent failure rate on the availability of its pages for viewing by visually impaired people.
It was better news for Carphone Warehouse, which continues to steadily climb the table. “They have been improving because they have been working hard at it. It’s good that it has not been an overnight improvement as it shows it is more long-standing changes that they are making,” says Shaw.
Yet again SiteMorse was unable to test both the Comet and Burberry sites because of their reliance on ‘assistive’ technology, which the company believes breaks the general “rules of accessibility” of internet sites.
However, after a recent claim by DSG that its Dixons and Currys sites were taking market share from Comet SiteMorse undertook a manual page-by-page review of 200 Comet website pages.
It found that 66 per cent of its pages were without keywords and descriptions, which Shaw says would make it very difficult for the search engines to index the site’s pages and would explain why Comet was failing to attract more customers and DSG was performing much better online.
Results table
| Website Address | Ranking | Errors | Accessibility |
| (out of 10) | (in HTML code) | (% of pages that fail) | |
| Signetgroupplc.com | 7.34 | 5 | 0.00 |
| Next.co.uk | 5.98 | 33 | 42.06 |
| Matalan.co.uk | 3.79 | 622 | 38.10 |
| Carphonewarehouse.com | 3.68 | 21 | 99.21 |
| Halfords.com | 3.24 | 40 | 30.40 |
| Marksandspencer.com | 2.72 | 2320 | 3.20 |
| Argos.co.uk | 2.62 | 42 | 8.00 |
| Hmv.co.uk | 2.32 | 165 | 13.60 |
| Boots.co.uk | 1.78 | 499 | 96.80 |
| Dixons.co.uk | 1.56 | 1531 | 99.22 |
| Carpetright.co.uk | 1.50 | 144 | 95.80 |
| Whsmith.co.uk | 1.38 | 82 | 38.28 |
Excluded
DIY.com |
Site undergoing “essential maintenance” |
Burberry.com |
Site reliant on Flash |
| Comet.com | Site reliant on JavaScript |
Tagged as: website testing
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