By Robert Castley

Six out of the nine sites monitored achieved an impressive response time of less than two seconds in April, with only Twitter, Hi5 and Bebo failing to reach this standard. Bebo in particular struggled with an average load time of 14.35 seconds for the month. At the other end of the spectrum, Facebook retained the top spot as being the quickest site to load, with an average time of 0.58 seconds in the UK. This is particularly impressive given that two thirds of the UK internet community are Facebook users; that’s around 50% of the UK population according to Fanalyzer.

YouTube struggled this month in terms of availability and was the only site to have a success rate below 99% with an average of 95.64%. Given that YouTube is the most popular global site for online video content, it is not ideal that almost 5% of UK traffic was met with loading difficulties or errors during April.

As users interact with these websites from a wide variety of devices and locations, social networking sites need to ensure that content is available and quick to load regardless of where or how users are attempting to access the site. However while it’s important that tablet and mobile sites are optimised, content providers mustn’t neglected internet sites, as making users wait for over 14 seconds for a site to load or having users unable to access the information they need is likely to turn site visitors away.

About the index

Six out of the nine sites monitored achieved an impressive response time of less than two seconds in April, with only Twitter, Hi5 and Bebo failing to reach this standard. Bebo in particular struggled with an average load time of 14.35 seconds for the month. At the other end of the spectrum, Facebook retained the top spot as being the quickest site to load, with an average time of 0.58 seconds in the UK. This is particularly impressive given that two thirds of the UK internet community are Facebook users; that’s around 50% of the UK population according to Fanalyzer.

YouTube struggled this month in terms of availability and was the only site to have a success rate below 99% with an average of 95.64%. Given that YouTube is the most popular global site for online video content, it is not ideal that almost 5% of UK traffic was met with loading difficulties or errors during April.

As users interact with these websites from a wide variety of devices and locations, social networking sites need to ensure that content is available and quick to load regardless of where or how users are attempting to access the site. However while it’s important that tablet and mobile sites are optimised, content providers mustn’t neglected internet sites, as making users wait for over 14 seconds for a site to load or having users unable to access the information they need is likely to turn site visitors away.

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.