Business At The Speed Of Sloths - speed of European web sites - Brief Article

NOT SURPRISINGLY, WEB designers continue to try to cram all sorts of bells and whistles into corporate home pages and etailing sites. After all, retailing on the Internet is all about flash--and Quicktime, and dynamic content.

But a recent study of European Web sites raises questions about the wisdom of such cramming. Mercury Interactive Corp., a US-based Web performance management company, monitored the home pages of companies in the UK, France, and Germany over a nine-month period. What Mercury discovered would likely stand the hairs of any etailing executive on end.

Some home pages in the UK, for example, took more than four minutes to load. Oral surgery takes less time. On the whole, Mercury found that Web sites for financial services companies were the worst performers in the UK, with an average load time of 5.8 seconds.

In Germany, some portals took more than 30 seconds to load. Of course, gateways (Netscape, Yahoo, and so on) feature lots of banner ads, which tend to slow down load times. Nevertheless, Hellen Omwando, an associate analyst at Forrester Research in Amsterdam, says consumers tend to be less patient with portals than with company sites, such as Amazon.com, which feature unique content. "They'll click to Yahoo or AOL if they don't reach T-Online straight away," she says.

Meanwhile, consumers in Lyon seeking virtual entertainment may want to consider charades. Web sites in the entertainment category were the slowest in France, according to Mercury. One speed demon took nearly three minutes to load.

To improve site performance, Omwando says corporates must make sure their network infrastructure is as robust as possible. She also stresses that manger's should encourage technology employees to adopt a 24-hour mentality since the digital economy operates around the clock. And she advises companies to regularly test their sites for any hiccups. "Even if a site has great content," she warns, "poor connectivity will lead consumers to shun you."

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