New research reveals the performance of public sector websites is
so slow it is discouraging uptake, writes Daniel Thomas
The start of the war in Iraq has underlined public demand for
government information online. But, although public sector
organisations are taking steps to meet the prime minister's 2005
deadline for making all government services available online, the
performance of many government websites may discourage public
uptake, new research from Parallel has revealed.
The research, exclusive to Computer Weekly, found that public
sector websites had the worst availability and download times
compared to all other industry sectors analysed by the network
monitoring firm.
The mean availability of all sites over the two-month monitoring
period was only 98.7%, equating to nearly five days of downtime per
website, per year, the research found. City councils had the lowest
availability at 97.8%, which equates to over eight days of downtime
per year.
The average download time for public sector sites when accessed via
a modem - as 84% of internet users do, according to Oftel - was
21.8 seconds, the research found. This is far in excess of 8
seconds, the accepted time limit after which experts believe most
users will become impatient.
This slow download time was probably caused by the large page size
found on most public sector organisations' home pages, Parallel
said. At 69Kbytes, the average home page size was 73% larger than
the government's recommended page size of 40Kbytes. And the
problems go right to the top - the home page of the official
website for 10 Downing Street was 187Kbytes, the largest of all 70
websites monitored.
Tim Moore, director at Parallel, said public sector organisations
should judge themselves in the same way as commercial businesses
when it comes to website performance.
"The public is used to increasing performance from commercial
websites and will demand the same level of performance from the
public sector," he said. "While the public sector is taking steps
to embrace the internet as an essential communication and
transactional channel in which to reach the public, the results of
this report show that public sector websites are currently not
achieving the same performance standards as commercial
websites."
According to a recent report from analyst Forrester Research, 58%
of consumers would be unlikely to return to a site where they
encountered problems on their first visit, while 62% said they were
unlikely to return to a site where a transaction had failed.
These rules apply as much to public sector organisations as they do
to commercial bodies, Moore said.
"Every service has competition, and in this case, the competition
will be mail, telephone and person-to-person transactions," he
said. "Customers will simply return to more traditional methods of
finding out information, paying council tax and so forth, and the
online initiative will fail."
Parallel monitored 70 public service, council and political party
websites, using its Nexus Watch automated monitoring tool. The
software emulated a customer connecting to a website every 15
minutes from 28 November to 20 January. The company recorded and
analysed website availability, download, connection and response
time and page size.
The public's demand for government information over the web was
underlined last week with the beginning of the war on Iraq.
Research from web monitoring firm Keynote Systems has revealed that
the beginning of hostilities and the potential increased threat of
terrorism led to a surge of interest in UK government information
websites, but that they failed to hold up to public demand.
The Home Office's dedicated Terrorism Information website failed to
meet demand with downloads approaching 1 minute (56.71 seconds)
during the lunchtime period on 19 March with availability dropping
to just 50%.
These statistics reveal major server capacity issues from the site,
said Keynote. Indeed, it seems that the threat of terrorism was a
real concern throughout the day as download speeds averaged only
35.49 seconds, the company said.
Of greater importance to UK citizens abroad, the Foreign and
Commonwealth Office site also suffered major capacity problems,
with download times of over a minute (76.03 seconds) during the
afternoon of 17 March with availability of only 83%. This will have
presented problems to anyone trying to access travel advice from
abroad, especially if they were using a "dial-up" connection,
Keynote said.
News sites performed better, but they failed to handle the peak in
demand over the lunchtime period on 18 March, the research found.
The BBC news site dropped in performance from an average download
speed of 0.47 seconds to 1.88 seconds between 1pm and 2pm and the
ITV news site mirrored the performance slowdown from 5.66 seconds
to 15.84 seconds.