October 2003 – Finance Websites Report and Ranking.

08 Oct 2003

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This months survey of websites of the leading banks and building societies has shown that far too many financial institutions are operating slow running websites and that some of them may not comply with best business practice.

A particular case in point is a bank website which was found to have had the second highest number of errors, failed basic speed tests and more crucially, had a simple broken link that stopped visitors accessing the website terms and conditions of use page.

“The simple broken link example highlights a situation which could have implications for all banks and building societies who do not carry out ongoing tests of their website. The errors are often simple to make and easy to correct, but very difficult to find” commented Sol Saad of website testing and monitoring company, Business2www (B2W).

B2W surveyed 30 of Britain’s leading banks and building societies and carried out around 1 million tests on each website, analysing download speeds and checking for defective links to pages, garbled e-mail addresses and missing graphics and pages. The company’s Sitemorse™ system has been specifically developed to test the functionality, performance and technical quality of websites.

Of the 30 websites that were tested, 22 of them failed all basic speed tests and half of them failed a basic meta data test for their front page. Only one site, the Bradford & Bingley showed no errors.

“This raises questions about how financial institutions manage and maintain their websites, especially at a time when they are spending many millions of pounds to promote their online operations to attract existing as well as new customers,” commented Sol Saad.

B2W says, overall the banking sector is showing signs that it is trying to reduce the numbers of website errors; The Cooperative Bank, Bradford and Bingley and LloydsTSB are good examples and were highly rated in the recent tests.

The Cooperative Bank came top overall, and the site with the fastest overall server response was Woolwich, where on average the page response was 0.0114 seconds, compared with the page response of the Abbey National website averaging 23 seconds per page.

Allied Irish Bank was bottom for the fourth time running.