By Robert Castley

Facebook dropped from the top spot in terms of availability in December with YouTube UK coming in first with a 99.99% success rate for the month. Once again however, Facebook was the quickest site of those monitored, with an impressive average download time of 0.65 seconds.

Bebo was by far the slowest site in December with an average response time of 8.12 seconds – more than five seconds slower than the index average. Only five of the nine sites monitored were able to achieve a response time of less than two seconds. It’s a good rule for sites to aim for a load time of less than two seconds in order to ensure that they don’t drive visitors away with unresponsive sites.

All of the sites, except Hi5, scored an availability of above 99.50%, with Hi5 struggling with an average score of 94.27%. YouTube’s results are particularly impressive given the size of the page and the amount of video content that is automatically loaded. By contrast, Facebook’s home page is very light and so it is therefore not as surprising that this page is quick to load and reliable. Site designers of social networking sites that are not achieving such good scores should look at these factors to see if they can identify any problems that are occurring in order to emulate the impressive performance of sites such as Facebook and YouTube.

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 a 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.