WatchMouse finds poor site performance for some SMI listed companies - Richemont & Zurich Financial found to be the worst.
Utrecht, the Netherlands, 20 May 2008 - WatchMouse, a leader in website performance monitoring, tested the sites belonging to Switzerland’s SMI listed companies for errors, availability and performance. Three of the 20 monitored sites were found to have ‘serious user issues’. These sites belong to Baloise, Zurich Financial and Richemont. Zurich Financial and Richemont’s sites were also amongst six SMI sites found to have an uptime well below the accepted industry standard.
During the two month monitoring period, one of WatchMouse’s monitoring stations tried to access the homepage of the sites every five minutes. Sites were expected to download within 4 seconds without any errors. Combining the errors, speed (load time) and availability measurements, WatchMouse calculated a Site Availability Index (SPI) for each of the sites. An SPI of ≤1,000 represents a ‘well performing’ site, 1,001 - 1,999 is regarded as ‘acceptable’, while a score of above 2,000 represents a site with ‘serious user issues’.
The poor SPI results of Richemont and Baloise sites were largely due to very long load times while the SPI result of Zurich Financial’s site was due to both long load times and a considerable number of errors.
Mark Pors said, “I would have anticipated Switzerland’s largest luxury goods and financial services companies to strive to provide their customers and investors with a fast, error free sites as an important channel through which they promote their products, services and build brand awareness. I am therefore, very surprised that this research found these major companies’ sites operating well below accepted industry standards.”
WatchMouse also reports on site uptime. In line with industry standards, WatchMouse ranks a site’s uptime as ‘good’ if it is ≥99.9%, ‘OK’ if it between 99.89% - 99.01% and ‘poor’ if it is ≤99%. WatchMouse CTO, Mark Pors points out that “99% uptime sounds great but when you calculate it, this means 80+ hours of downtime a year. That’s one working day per month.”
Of the 20 monitored SIM sites, those with the worst uptime results belong to: Nobel Biocare, Richemont, Zurich Financial, Nestle, Adecco and Synthes. Synthes’s site scored 95% meaning it was unavailable for more than a day during monitoring.
Source: WatchMouse.com