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.
