Report: Mobile Website Performance Getting Worse
In the evolving Web, where mobile web growth is exploding and therefore the mobile experience matters as much as the desktop one, it is becoming increasingly important for websites to ensure that their mobile site performs well. According to a new mobile web performance benchmark produced by Gomez (a web application performance management firm) and dotMobi (the company behind the .mobi Internet domain), there is a widening performance gap between the traditional fixed web and the mobile web. According to Gomez data, traditional fixed websites loaded an average of 3% faster in April than in March, while mobile websites were 9% slower. We check out Gomez's data below.
The Mobile Web Experience Benchmarks released by Gomez and dotMobi compare and rank the mobile Web experiences provided by the top businesses in a variety of industries. We look at three two of them below: search, media and banking. Gomez measured five things to assess the performance of mobile websites in those industries: readiness, discoverability, speed, success and consistency. The charts from Gomez are below, along with added commentary by ReadWriteWeb.
Here's an explanation of the performance measures:
- Discoverability - how readily a consumer can find the mobile website using different URLs.
- Readiness - how well the mobile website renders on popular mobile devices.
- Availability - the percentage of successful transactions or the availability of a Web page.
- Response time - how long each page takes to download and the duration of an entire transaction.
- Consistency - how well the mobile website performs on different mobile carriers, in different geographies and time frames.
Mobile Search
Amazon, AOL and Yahoo all score high, with MSN and MySpace trailing behind. However it's disappointing that Google's mobile search wasn't included - apparently it "did not meet the technical requirements", which would be a first for a Google app! Yahoo's mobile search is generally regarded as one of the market leaders, alongside Google, so it will be pleased that usability is ranked strongly too by Gomez.
Mobile Banking
Lastly, looking at an example of 'real world' mobile websites that many mainstream people would likely use, these banking statistics show that Bank of America has proven to be (ahem) the most stable. Judging by the lack of bars for most banks in the 'summary' chart though, mobile banking has a fair way to go to achieve consistent performance for consumers.
You can check out other industries, mobile and regular websites, on the Gomez site. Let us know your own experience with mobile website performance in the comments below, including of ReadWriteWeb's own mobile website at http://m.readwriteweb.com.
Update: Originally this article included a chart and commentary on the Media industry, however we learned after publication that this was for regular websites and not mobile. Our apologies, we've deleted that section.
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Holy cow, I haven't seen Gomez (Advisors) since the online bank/broker wars of the late 90s!
It's great to see this issue raised. Fast web page load times are a critical component of a good user experience.
Having a 'fast website' becomes even more critical when your customers and clients access your products and services using mobile devices and....accessing using mobile devices from around the world! If you think speed is an issue when you are in the same country as the servers, speed test your website for load times around the world - you'll be surprised.
Interesting stats, which also make logical sense.
As the Mobile Web grows and more and more companies find their feet, there'll be a lot of bad experiences before any abundance of good.
Just as there was an explosion in car accidents as cars on the road numbers increased back in the late 20th century, as Mobile Web experiences will suffer as more and more 'get driving'.
J.
Ps. I love RWW. There, I said it.
To pwb - Gomez is alive and strong and has been since 1997! Check us out at www.gomez.com or on Twitter @Gomez_Inc. We've come a long way since the Gomez Advisors days.
To the editor and readers of this piece, I want to point out that the Media Benchmark referenced is NOT a mobile benchmark, rather measurement data about a multi-step process searching for an article on the REGULAR websites of these media companies. It is one of the 100s of web performance benchmarks that Gomez produces. The new mobile benchmarks track the airline, banking and search industries only.
Thanks, Samantha McGarry
Gomez PR Manager
Glad to see Crisp Wireless created sites CNN, Washington Post scoring well. It would be interesting to look at these stats across platforms as well since it is so critical to optimize mobile sites for each device and provide the best user experience.
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Pretty interesting results. What criteria defined the list of the sites that were analyzed?