Consumers are waiting anything from six seconds to more than 30 seconds for the homepage’s of the top ranking travel sites to load. Web management specialist Gomez tested a range of Hitwise top travel sites over a four week period in October to find complete load times range from just over six seconds to more…
Top travel sites show poor load times
Consumers are waiting anything from six seconds to more than 30 seconds for the homepage’s of the top ranking travel sites to load.
Web management specialist Gomez tested a range of Hitwise top travel sites over a four week period in October to find complete load times range from just over six seconds to more than 30 seconds.
Industry reports show consumers are turned off when websites fail to respond quickly, with Aberdeen Group saying business performance suffers when web pages take longer than five seconds.
All of the companies in the Gomez study failed to meet the five second threshold with some taking more than 30 seconds to fully load homepage content.
Sites such as easyJet, Thomas Cook and the TrainLine were among those tested with the low-cost airline emerging as having one of the best average response times. Rivals such as Ryanair and British Airways did not perform as well.
Gomez measures how quickly visitors can access content and perform tasks on a home broadband connection using the company’s Last Mile worldwide network of 100,000 desktops to provide a real picture of how sites perform across different geographies, connection speeds and ISPs.
Other companies included in the study were lastminute.com, Travelodge, Tripadviser and Thomson Holidays.
Gomez measured the total time it took for every element to be loaded including content that consumers don’t initially see because it is below the foldline.
> Blog post: Travel companies are poor at it, Google may start valuing it. Problem? [Travel Weekly]
