By Robert Castley

The response times for the social networking sites monitored are fairly quick overall this month with six of the ten monitored achieving an average time of less than two seconds. Bebo was the only site to take longer than three seconds to load with an average response time of 4.49 seconds for the month. Facebook was once again the fastest site to load with a response time of just over half a second.

The availability scores for August were also extremely impressive with all of the ten sites achieving an average success rate of over 99.63%. Flickr was the top performing site with a score of 99.97%. Many of the sites monitored have made a marked improvement on their performance in July, with WAYN improving by almost 3% following its bottom spot ranking last month of 96.73%.

As well as improving on online performance, it’s important that social networking sites focus on their mobile performance for all users, regardless of mobile device or network. This need for a focus on mobile is highlighted by stats announced this week from the UK Office of National Statistics, which show that almost half of UK users are using their mobile phones as the first port of call when they go online. 45% of those surveyed said that they made use of the net while out and about, which is an increase of 14% compared to last year.

Consumers are now able to access information whenever and wherever they want it, and this has driven social networking site traffic up markedly. It’s great that the stats for these sites are continuing to improve month on month, however some sites still have some way to go to meet with consumer demands, both on fixed line sites and on mobile.

About the author

Robert Castley has been solutions consultant at Keynote for over two years. Prior to working at Keynote, Robert worked as a Professional Services Consultant at a document management company, Macro 4, where he worked on developing custom web interfaces.

Robert is passionate about web performance and optimisation and has over 10 years of web development experience. One of his proudest achievements is developing one of the world’s most popular Open Source Content Management Systems to the masses – Mambo, which now lives on as Joomla!

Robert has a BTEC National Diploma in Computer Studies.

About the company

Keynote Systems is the global leader in Internet and mobile cloud monitoring. It provides companies with solutions for continuously improving the online experience. Founded in 1995, Keynote provides testing, monitoring and measurement products and services for any enterprise including online portals, e-commerce sites, B2B sites, mobile operators and mobile infrastructure providers. Keynote products and services help companies improve customer experience in four areas: Web performance, mobile quality, streaming and real user experience testing.