Visitors like fast websites, and your digital performance suffers if your site loads slowly. How fast are UK charity websites, and which charity has the fastest website?
I’ve surveyed the websites of the top 10 UK charity brands, as identified by the 2014 Charity Brand Index. From a performance perspective, the ideal is to have a site that loads quickly, and for the amount of downloading required to be as small as possible. So you want a low ‘load time’ and a low ‘page weight’.
Here’s how the sites compare:
- BBC Children in Need and Comic Relief had the fastest home pages.
- If you’re commissioning a new website, or want to improve the performance of your existing site, aim to beat the average performance of these sites. Aim for pages that:
– load in 3.5 seconds or less
– have a page weight of 1.9 MB or less - If your pages load in 2 seconds or under, and if your page weight is 1MB or less, you’re doing very well.
This data was obtained by running 4 unthrottled desktop speed tests using GTMetrix between 16 August and 22 August 2015 and averaging the results.
An interesting follow-up would be to look at mobile performance: set a mobile browser and throttle the connection to a common mobile download speed.