In the second review of the Major Banks and Building Societies websites, NatWest came top of the table overall, Co-operative Bank a close second [completed with Sitemorse™ the global leader in automated functional testing], with the Allied Irish Bank bottom of the Major Banks and Building Societies. The British Bankers Association came last overall.

Compared with our previous League Table survey, there was a significant improvement by LloydsTSB. In contrast the winners last time Alliance & Leicester - performed very poorly.

By far the slowest site, in terms of both server response time and download speed was Abbey National. HFC Bank had the fastest server response and the Bank of England the fastest download speed.

Ranked by errors, Woolwich came top when with Allied Irish Bank last. HFC Bank had the least number of warnings with Allied Irish Bank having the most.

Over half of the sites, [17 out of 28] tested failed very basic test of `Meta data’ – having the first page of the site set-up correctly for indexing – by either a user or a number of the internet search engines.

10 of the 28 sites failed the test of Home Page download time at the slowest lowest level of connectivity, whilst 16 failed at the fastest speed tested.

Overall results;

NatWest
Cooperative Bank
Woolwich
Bradford & Bingley
Skipton Building Society
HBOS Group
Northern Rock
HSBC
Halifax
LloydsTSB
Barclays
Britannia
Financial Services Authority
Northern Bank
Bank of England
Royal Bank of Scotland
HFC Bank
Clydesdale
Nationwide
Bank of Scotland
Yorkshire Bank
Portman Building Society
Abbey National
Birmingham Midshires
Alliance & Leicester
Coventry Building Society
Allied Irish Bank
British Bankers Association

No Banking Site is Error-Free, and, whilst a minority have relatively few errors, the majority have significantly more than the FTSE 100 websites.

Whilst there is significant variation, including dramatic improvements on some sites, most are significantly slower than other corporate sites.

The Bank of England, FSA and BBA sites perform less well in some respects than the Bank and Building Society websites themselves. This is not an ideal platform from which to develop standards or regulations relating to website performance in the Financial Services and Banking Sectors.

The Banking websites score a weighted average MorseMark™ Score of 4.6 (ex-10) versus the FTSE average of 6.1, with median scores of 4.5 and 6.1 respectively.

Overall they are currently operating (on average) at about half the average download speed of the FTSE 100 websites.

Top 10 errors

file/html/badmeta
url/fetch/notfound
file/url/badpath
file/url/badquery
file/url/offtop
url/fetch/exception
url/fetch/noaddr
file/html/longtitle
url/fetch/unknownstatus
file/url/badfragment