UK retailers Tesco, Next, Marks & Spencer and John Lewis have all fared well in a test of mobile website performance carried out by Keynote Systems, which specialise in internet and mobile cloud monitoring. The company is tracking the mobile site performance of 17 top retailers in the UK, Germany, France, Australia and Sweden to compare download speeds and site availability.

The results for 11 – 18 March, 2011, show Tesco in first place with a download speed of 4.39 seconds, followed by Next on 4.46 seconds. Marks & Spencer is in fourth on 5.83 seconds, with John Lewis in fifth on 6.12 seconds. All four sites are powered by US mobile web design and usability firm, Useablenet.

The full listing, with country identifier and download speed shown in seconds, is as follows:

1. Tesco (UK) – 4.39  
2. Next (UK) – 4.46  
3. OTTO (Ger) – 5.42  
4. Marks & Spencer (UK) 0 5.83  
5. ALDI (Ger) – 5.79  
6. FNAC (Fr) – 5.83  
7. John Lewis (UK) – 6.12  
8. Chanel (Fr) – 6.39  
9. Carrefour (Fr) – 7.57  
10. Amazon (Ger) – 8.18  
11. Woolworths (Au) – 8.81  
12. Myer (Au) – 9.47  
13. IKEA (Swe) – 13.69 
14. H&M (Swe) – 14.35 
15. JB Hi-Fi (Au) – 14.63 
16. Ahlens (Swe) – 15.77 
17. Ellos (Swe) – 34.77 

When it comes to availability, the ranking looks like this, in terms of percentage uptime:

1. Myer (Au) – 100  
2. Woolworths (Au) – 99.68
3. Marks & Spencer (UK) – 98.07 
4. OTTO (Ger) – 98.01
5. ALDI (Ger) – 97.68 
6. Chanel (Fr) – 97.5  
7. Tesco (UK) – 97.48 
8. Amazon (Ger) – 96.99 
9. Next (UK) – 96.88 
10. JB Hi-Fi (Au) – 96.88 
11. Carrefour (Fr) – 96.53 
12. John Lewis (UK) – 96.32 
13. H&M (Swe) – 94.67 
14. FNAC (Fr) – 93.1  
15. Ahlens (Swe) – 92.07 
16. IKEA (Swe) – 91.02 
17. Ellos (Swe) – 80.26 

The Swedish sites monitored struggled in terms of speed, with all of the sites monitored ranking towards the bottom of the table. Keynote points out that a key reason for this is that all the sites monitored in Sweden are the retailer’s main web pages, with vast amounts of data to download, as no mobile sites exist for these major outlets. This, says Keynote, highlights the importance of retailers offering a dedicated mobile site, to ensure improved performance and usability to encourage transactions from mobiles.

Only one of the mobile sites monitored, the Australian site Myer, achieved 100 per cent availability. Marks and Spencer was the best performing UK mobile site in fifth place, with 98.07 per cent availability. John Lewis had the lowest availability of the UK mobile sites monitored, with 96.32 per cent, putting it in 14th place overall.

“Mobile is quickly becoming a key channel for commerce, and it’s time that retailers started paying close attention to the online experience of their mobile customers,” says Robert Castley, lead solutions consultant at Keynote Systems. “While it’s clear that mobile sites still lag some way behind full internet sites in terms of availability and speed, with mobile devices becoming more and more sophisticated, consumers are beginning to expect a comparable performance on their phones as on their computers. Many customers won’t be happy if they’re made to wait more than 10 seconds for a mobile site to load, and they’re likely to navigate away from the site. This will not only result in a loss of custom on that occasion, but site visitors might be dissuaded from visiting the same site in the future.”