Herman Ng, mobile performance evangelist at Keynote said, “Overall, almost all the mobile sites performed quite well during the two week period up to and including Valentine’s Day. A few of the sites experienced latency in the two to three days leading up to the weekend before Valentine’s Day. We speculate that this was a result of end users trying to complete Valentine’s plans before the weekend. With the exception of one mobile site, there were no major outages or service interruptions.”
Ng continued, “The mobile sites of OpenTable and Match.com have a very light weight design making them the fastest sites to load on mobile devices. Both were ranked as top five performers. While it’s true that keeping a mobile site’s design simple will generally improve speed, sites such as Ghirardelli and FTD that had more content still performed relatively well in terms of both load time and reliability. They both have page sizes over 100KB but their load time was faster than the median and their reliability ranked 1st and 3rd respectively. They are to be commended. Two of the mobile sites we measured over the two week period that had the slowest load time also had the lowest reliability, and one of those sites also had the most content compared to all the other sites.”
Mobile websites selected for the index were: Amazon, 1-800-Flowers.com, FTD, Ghirardelli, Gifts.com, Godiva, KL Wines, Match.com, OpenTable, ProFlowers and Victoria’s Secret. The mobile data was gathered on an hourly basis beginning on February 1 until midnight February 15 from San Francisco, New York, Chicago and Dallas and was downloaded to the iPhone4 on AT&T, EVO on Sprint, DroidX on Verizon and myTouch on T-Mobile.
On the connected Web, OpenTable was the fastest site with an average speed of 2.06 seconds to download the homepage and Hallmark was the most reliable site with an availability of 99.97 percent.
Dave Karow, senior product manager of Internet performance at Keynote said, “While the fastest site, OpenTable provided a lean page with just a few images, the other top scorers in speed were quite visually rich. Kudos to all of the top five for delivering a compelling experience in less than three seconds! The entire index of sites performed well throughout the whole period, with only a few isolated incidents. All in all, these sites were well equipped to handle whatever chocolate, flower and greeting seekers had to throw at them.”
Websites selected for the index were: 123greetings, 1-800-Flowers, Amazon, Blue Mountain, Egreetings, FTD, Ghirardelli, Gifts.com, Godiva, Hallmark, JacquieLawson.com, K&L Wines, Match.com, Open Table, ProFlowers, Red Envelope and Victoria's Secret. The connected Web data was gathered every 15 minutes beginning on February 1 until midnight February 15 from 10 geographically dispersed locations on six different networks, using an Internet Explorer 7 browser: Boston (Verizon), Chicago (Savvis), Dallas (AT&T), Detroit (Level3), Houston (Level3), Los Angeles (AT&T), New York (Sprint), Philadelphia (Verizon), San Francisco (Sprint) and Washington D.C. (Qwest).
