December 4, 2009 (FinancialWire) — Gomez, the web performance division of Compuware Corp. (NASDAQ: CPWR), reported mobile and Web site performance data for the nation’s top retailers for Black Friday through Cyber Monday. Gomez tests and analysis found that:

 * Among the top 20 retailers, the average time for the process of going to a home page, searching for a product, adding it to a shopping cart and checking out took almost 17 seconds. At the top performing retail site, this took just 10.2 seconds at best; the worst performing retail site took 24 seconds. Only one retailer, LL Bean, achieved a 100 percent success rate for this end-to-end process; the lowest score was 83.59 percent. The average was 97.60 percent. These unsuccessful transaction tests indicate periods of time when shoppers may have been unable to complete purchases.

 * Home page load times for the top 50 retailers ranged from 0.6 seconds to 7.79 seconds, almost four times longer than the 2 second “standard” than the average person will wait(1). Thirty four retailers’ home pages showed 100 percent availability; however, 15 retailers performed at less than 99.9 percent with the poorest availability at 92.13 percent. Average home page availability was 99.77 percent.

 * On average, mobile retail Web sites loaded 1.5 seconds slower than retailers’ “traditional” home pages. Of the 14 mobile retail sites monitored, page load speeds ranged from 2.18 seconds at best to almost 6 seconds at worst, with 3.7 seconds the average. Ten of the 14 suffered from less than perfect availability, the lowest being 98.08 percent.

 * Fewer retailers suffered major performance issues on Cyber Monday than in prior years with the notable exception of HP whose Web site manifested significant performance problems throughout the day, resulting in its 83.59 percent availability on the Gomez Retail Product Order benchmark. Some other retailers experienced intermittent slowdowns that might have frustrated shoppers and caused them to shop elsewhere.

 * Overall, retailers’ Web performance was on par with usual trends observed by Gomez’s monthly benchmarks, signaling that most had conducted rigorous testing to ensure that the double-edged challenge of increased site complexity and peak traffic did not cripple shoppers’ online experiences.

 * Gomez observed that the poor performance of third-party services and content providers was the most common reason for slowdowns at many retailers’ sites.

As they compete for shoppers’ wallets and high expectations for Web site speeds, smaller retailers also have to compete with the massive infrastructure and resources of the major retail brands. This year many large and SMB retailers signed up for Compuware’s program of free Web performance monitoring, which started November 17 and ran until the end of Cyber Monday. The free service helped them understand how their sites were working from their customers’ perspectives and provided alerts if performance degraded below acceptable thresholds. In total 223 alerts were issued during the course of the program.

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