July Website Rankings of 100 Retailers

Matalan moved up to the top spot as the best performing website in the table of 100 retail websites tested this month for The Retail Bulletin pushing last month's best performer DFS into third place.

The comprehensive list of 100 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 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 top performing sites encompass “a bit of everything” with Matalan, Vision Express, DFS, Morrisons and Tesco Direct bagging the top five places.

What is surprising, according to Shaw, is that the top 15 sites are typically much less reliant on the internet for their revenues than the bottom 15, which includes a host of big names that rely increasingly heavily on their websites for their sales such as Dixons, Amazon, Endless, HMV, Maplin Electronics, Play.com, as well as mobile phone companies Orange and Phones 4u. “If the table was reversed then it would make more sense,” he suggests.

It surprises Shaw that these companies continue to deliver consistently poor performances in the tests. He cites the recent Carphone Warehouse advertising campaign, which highlights mobile internet and gives only its website as a point on contact, but its site achieves only 2.60 marks out of 10 so is not a great advert for the company.

What is frustrating about the poor performances is that they could be addressed relatively easily, according to Shaw, because the Sitemorse testing focuses on basic things such as broken links, missing images, and the inclusion of titles on pages for search engine optimisation.

This is why each month there are some major movements in the table. One of the biggest climbers in July was Holland & Barrett that moved up 25 places to 17th spot with a score of 5.16 compared with 4.12 last month. Shaw says the company has improved functional aspects of its site such as broken links and it has had a big impact on its performance. It is a similar situation with Goldsmiths that improved the accessibility and functionality of its website and moved up 35 places to 57th spot with a score of 3.30.

The accessibility of sites to visually impaired people continues to be an issue for many retailers and probably one of the most surprising poor performers is the Co-op that fails all the accessibility tests. “The Co-op focuses on ethical policies and supporting communities but every page fails the tests, which is not very good,” says Shaw.

For yet another month it has not been possible to score and rank the sites of Gap and Boots. They continue to be excluded from the table as a result of them either being ‘down’ at the time of testing or because of their reliance on ‘assistive’ technology, which Sitemorse believes breaks the general “rules of accessibility” of internet sites.

To provide an even more comprehensive breakdown of the relative performances of the UK’s online retailers the top 100 is to be extended to as many as 250 retailers. If you would like your company to be included in this new more representative list then please email your website details to news@theretailbulletin.com

Glynn Davis

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