SiteMorse™, the leading automated website diagnostic service, today announces the publication of research, commissioned by NMQA (www.nmqa.com), an independent specialist testing consultancy, to rank the performance and user experience of the top 20 retail brand websites.

With 52 per cent of households in the UK (12.8 million) having internet access this year, compared with just nine per cent (2.2 million) in 1998*, this festive season looks set to see the biggest growth in online transactions to date. The increase in internet usage has prompted NMQA to commission SiteMorse™ to identify which retailers are ready for the online Christmas rush.

The SiteMorse™ research study examined the top 20 sites for a fixed seven day period, at 15 minute intervals and tested the homepages of each site for response time and errors, two factors which will determine whether a user will choose to shop on a particular website.

The results showed:
•Amazon.co.uk came top with 100 per cent availability and usability
•Toys R Us (www.toysrus.co.uk) was second with 100 per cent availability but 99.75 per cent usability
•The least usable website was www.asda.com, which each time tested, failed to meet the basic standard

The criteria set by SiteMorse™ is for the front page of each site to respond within 1.5 seconds to a request, and to have a download speed greater than five kilobytes per second. This testing equates to the minimum response time expected by an average user.

The good news is that all the top 20 sites tested were available for 98 per cent of the duration of the test. However the testing also revealed that although the site availability was good, there were problems in the number of errors which occurred on the available pages. One example was found on www.debenhams.com where a window that should have displayed images of items for sale, was in fact blank.

SiteMorse™ also carried out it’s standard MorseMark™ testing process on the first 250 pages of each of the websites tested during the seven day period. This examines the website performance, accessibility, metadata, HTML quality and function of the sites.

Two high street fashion brands came top of the league with Next (www.next.co.uk) at number one and Topshop (www.topshop.co.uk) in second place. At the bottom of the table, representing the poorest performing site overall, was HMV (www.hmv.co.uk)