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JetBlue has one of the fastest performing mobile sites around: study

Travel-related mobile sites deliver the second fastest average response times when compared with other verticals, according to a new report from Compuware. 

Mobile users? expectations are growing when it comes to being able to easily and quickly access as well as load mobile Web sites, according to Compuware. While marketers across several industries are increasing the size of their mobile sites to address the need for rich content, they are often doing so without the proper performance testing, resulting in poor experiences for users.

?While mobile site providers recognize the increasing role mobile Web sites play in reaching consumers, for the most part, they focused on complexity over efficiency,? said Jonathan Ranger, director of the benchmarks practice at Compuware, Detroit, MI.

?Mobile sites added more content while treading water on performance,? he said.

?While research indicates consumers expect similar performance no matter the device used, mobile sites lagged well behind traditional Web sites in terms of aggregate performance results for the same industries.?

Bigger not always better
The Compuware ?Best of the Web? Performance Trends report measured the home page performance of the largest mobile sites across multiple industries including automotive, banking, travel and retail.

The results indicate that the travel industry has the second fastest mobile sites overall with an average response time of 8.339 seconds. Banking came in first with an average response time of 6.928 seconds.

The automotive industry had the slowest sites, with an average response time of 12.711 seconds, as well as the largest mobile home pages. Sports media had the second slowest and second largest mobile home pages.

In an earlier report, 2011 Best of the Web, Compuware identified the leaders by industry for mobile performance. JetBlue is the leader in travel, Acura for automotive, QVC for retail and JP Morgan Chase and KeyBank are tied for retail banking.

Compuware also found that all industries continue to increase the size of their mobile home pages, with mobile pages growing 103 percent in 2011. The industries with the largest increases were banking at 316 percent, news media at 227 percent and sports media at 196 percent.

The industries with the smallest increases were travel at 16 percent and retail at 62 percent.

The findings suggest that marketers are increasing mobile site page sizes without the proper performance testing and optimization processes. While mobile site managers are trying to meet the growing need for mobile sites to have the same rich content that is found on desktop sites, performance problems can be caused by not properly testing and optimizing such enhancements.

In order to address both the desire for rich content and fast response times, marketers have to carefully assess their mobile strategy to insure their attempt to deliver one does not compromise the other.

?Balance mobile site density with performance responsiveness,? Mr. Ranger said. ?Mobile marketers need to recognize screen real estate and fluctuating wireless connection speeds require mobile sites to follow a different game plan than the traditional Web in order to meet performance expectations.

?Smaller sites with optimized content, as well as limited connections and hosts, make for a better user experience,? he said. ?Mobile marketers will need to make informed content/performance tradeoffs to assure the greatest mobile strategy impact.?

Meeting expectations
The report also found that the top three performers in four categories - automotive, banking, retail and travel - exceed consumers? expectations for mobile site performance. This means that consumers visiting the mobile sites for the vast majority of brands do not have their expectations met.

Not meeting expectations in mobile can be costly for brands as consumers can easily visit another brand?s mobile site to find what they are looking for. That consumer may never return to the site with the poor performance, meaning that the brand has lost that customer.

The new report also reveals that some marketers are not prepared for the increased traffic being driven to their mobile sites when they increase promotional activity or for key events.

?There is a consistent and pervasive theme of increasing density of home page size,? Mr. Ranger said. ?This isn?t specific to certain verticals, but consistent for all the verticals in our study.

?The average mobile home page sizes increased 1.5x to as much as 2.5x from the first quarter 2011 to the fourth quarter 2011,? he said.