The official Rugby World Cup (RWC) app and website perform better than their equivalents at the last major sporting event, the 2014 FIFA World Cup. Thats according to Dynatrace, which gave both a performance health check.

The RWC app has been designed to ensure that users don’t experience any delays and can continue to navigate the app whilst waiting for content to load. Initially launching the app was identified as the slowest stage of the process, taking an average of around three seconds. Dynatrace claims this delay is primarily down to third-party content provided by Stackla, which loads the apps social media widgets.

“Today’s digital services are built around a highly intricate framework of third-party services to enhance functionality and provide the most engaging experience for users,” said Michael Allen, solutions VP at Dynatrace. “However, third-party integration means businesses no longer have complete control over the user experience. You can have the best mobile app or website in the world, but it can still be dragged down by poor optimisation of the third-party content. This is why businesses need to maintain complete end-to-end visibility into the application delivery chain to identify weak spots before the user experience is affected.”

Following a redesign, the RWC site was also given the thumbs-up, with a stable 300 milliseconds response time for the web server. Dynatrace singles out the use of ‘sprite sheets’ to load a group of images as a single file as a particular improvement over FIFAs site, which caused delays by loading flag images for each country individually.

However, the tests did find that it can take nearly 4.5 seconds before the main pages content appears in a browser, due to the inefficient integration of a number of features powered by JavaScript and CSS files.