February Website Rankings of Retailers

Despite an improvement in the overall quality of retailers' websites many of the worst offenders in the industry with the poorest performing online stores are the UK's biggest high street names.

By Glynn Davis

Among the retailers languishing at the foot of the table of over 100 sites tested in February for The Retail Bulletin are Marks & Spencer, Boots, WH Smith and Dixons who all scored less than three out of 10 on a range of criteria (see below).

This compares with the growing number of companies at the top end of the table that score a credible six out of 10 and are again led by top site DFS with an impressive 8.88.

The comprehensive list of sites, which includes not only the largest players but also some of the smaller specialist online merchants, has been created by The Retail Bulletin and specialist website testing company Sitemorse(in associaton with Interwoven) that used its automated testing of the first 125 pages of each retailer’s site to generate a ranked table.

Lawrence Shaw, founder of Sitemorse, says the poor performance of some of the UK’s biggest retailers is very disappointing and could be seriously affecting their businesses above simply losing out on online sales.

He points to the failings of the Northern Rock website as a contributing factor in the run on the bank and company’s ultimate demise: “They had ongoing problems with their website and people lost confidence in the company as they could not get information off the site. If people lose confidence in a business then it is a slippery slope, a downward spiral.”

One of the issues he has been picking up is poor search engine optimisation among many retailers. He cites Littlewoods Direct, which is languishing in 97th place in the table, as doing a particularly poor job in optimising its site for the search engines.

Sitemorse found that 44 per cent of its pages did not have titles and 97 per cent did not have any keywords or descriptions. This means the company will be spending a lot more money to be picked up by the search engines than it actually needs to: “If you’ve not got keywords then getting naturally listed by the search engines is very difficult and costs a lot of money.”

Shaw adds: “I can’t believe Mark Newton-Jones [Littlewoods chief executive], who is spending good money on the site, would be happy if he knew the majority of the site’s pages did not even have titles. It beggars belief and logic.”

He suggests senior people in retail businesses should be asking questions about their websites because there are lots of people out there who are not doing a very good job running sites.

Also doing a poor job are the people in charge of the website of Staples, which is 78th in the table, as the home page does not even have a title. “It is one of the most important pages and to not have a title means it will not get picked up easily by the search engines for organic listings,” explains Shaw.

Accessibility also remains a problem for many retailers with their sites still making it impossible for visually impaired people to access them. Bookseller Borders is among the villains who have all their pages failing the Sitemorse accessibility tests.

“You have to assume that they are not bothered about people who are visually impaired even though they sell audio books. How people who need these books actually buy them is an interesting question,” says Shaw.

The accessibility issue and poor code quality has cost Borders dear this month as it has fallen 53 places to 55th spot with a score of 4.94 out of 10. However, the worst performer this month is Republic, which is propping up the table in 109th place with a paltry 0.88 out of 10. Shaw finds this surprising as its target audience are young consumers who are the most technologically-literate.

But it is not all bad news as the average scores at the top of the table continue to grow and there have been some notable performances. These include the jump of 54 places by Jessops into seventh spot with a score of 7.31 and Carphone Warehouse, which moves up 73 places to 18th place, following a lot of work being done on its site over the past few months.

Online specialist ASOS has also performed well with a move up to 14th place with a score of 6.52 with Shaw noting that the company has been particularly pro-active at sorting out any problems that have occurred on its site.

And finally this is the first time that it has been possible to test the site of Gap following the decision by the company to remove ‘assistive’ technology from its site, which Sitemorse believes breaks the general “rules of accessibility” of internet sites.

In order to continue to provide a comprehensive breakdown of the relative performances of the UK’s online retailers we would like to hear from you if you want your company to be included in the table. Please email your website details to: glynnd@theretailbulletin.com

About Sitemorse

Sitemorse checks compliance, measures performance and tests function of your websites, by reading content, checking code and reviewing infrastructure to reduce risk caused by on-line failure. From single page monitoring to a complete site review, Sitemorse provides both management summaries and detailed technical reports (down to the line in the code).

View the rankings here