Website Benchmark - FTSE100: Top website Bunzl, Bottom Marks and Spencer. 20% fail accessibility

13 Aug 2003

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Top of the league and best site overall was Bunzl plc, in second place Amersham plc. At the bottom of the table representing the poorest site overall was Marks and Spencer plc.

21 of the sites tested were completely inaccessible due to severe violations of Priority 1 accessibility guidelines on their front pages.

- 3 sites had no errors, 21 sites having less than 10 errors.

- There were 7 sites that had over 1,000 errors; 2 sites had over 15,000 errors.

- 58 sites tested failed basic meta data tests for their front page.

- 25 of the sites tested passed all basic speed tests, looking at first page download, simulated as being viewed by a home [56k], ADSL [512k] and user with corporate access [1mb], with 33 failing all tests.

- The site with the lowest number of warnings (poor html) was Next plc – just 36. BT plc had the highest number of warnings, with over 90,000. Marks and Spencer, Kingfisher and Boots all had over 50,000.

- The site with fastest overall server response was Next plc, where the average page response was 0.085 seconds. The site with the slowest response time again was Scottish Power plc where average page response was over 57 seconds per page.

- Highest download speed was Riotinto plc, and Marks and Spencer plc had the slowest download speed of sites tested.


The findings take into account the site size; e.g. a website with 10 pages and 1 error would score the same as a website with 100 pages and 10 errors – both having page/error ratio of 10:1.

Essentially, the Percentage Ratings are derived from statistics and averages across the League Table Report, whilst the MorseMark Ratings are based on over 10,000 tests of commercial, institutional and other websites conducted over the last year.

Tests were completed during the last week of July ’03, and a free copy of your own site summary is available on request. Our next report will be produced around the 15th September 2003.