Mobile sites 30% slower than wired web performance

Mobile websites are 30 percent slower when compared to computer-based Internet browsing according to a new study conducted by web application experience management firm Gomez and mobile web domain registry dotMobi. The study ranked the mobile web experience provided by leading businesses in the airline, banking and search industries according to five key elements of the mobile web experience: readiness, discoverability, speed, success and consistency. Yahoo led search providers across all five mobile web metrics, earning first place among the nine search companies studied-- Amazon, Ask and Google tied for second place, and MSN came in last, hampered by poor scores in availability (94.5 percent compared to a category average of 98.9 percent) and response time (8.6 seconds compared to a category average of 6 seconds).

Bank of America was the leader among six banking sites, buoyed by its strengths in discoverability, response time and consistency. Chase followed in second, even though it placed last in availability (97.3 percent). AirTran, Continental and Southwest all tied for first place in the airline category. "As dotMobi announced in a recent study, there are now more than 1.1 million websites designed for mobile users, and that number is continuing to grow at a incredibly fast pace," said dotMobi CEO Trey Harvin in a prepared statement. "Helping consumers better understand which of those sites will offer them a good experience--no matter what handset or operator they're using--will help increase the use of the mobile Web. Benchmarking allows businesses to see their sites in relation to the sites of their industry peers, which will also help drive the creation of more good sites for consumers to use."

For more on the Gomez/dotMobi study:
- read this release

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