New stats from website monitoring firm Keynote Systems have revealed that ITV’s website is struggling to cope with the additional traffic it is receiving during the early stages of the World Cup.
The firm is monitoring the performance of the World Cup pages of several key football sites during this summer’s extravaganza: BBC Sport, Eurosport, the FA, Football.co.uk, ITV World Cup, the Premier League, Sky Sports, Sporting Life, TalkSPORT and TEAMtalk.
After week one of the tournament ITV’s site and Football.co.uk were the slowest, taking 6.47 and 8.32 to load respectively. The BBC was leading the way, taking just 1.19 seconds to load. TEAMtalk was second on 2.77 seconds. The average loading time was 4.04 seconds.
ITV also struggled when it came to site availability, with availability of 97.39%, only ahead of TEAMtalk, on 96.96% and Football.co.uk on 94.46%. The BBC and the FA were top with 99.79% availability.
These figures will come as no surprise to anyone who tried to watch the first game of the tournament on ITV’s website – the live stream was unavailable for many users and its iPhone app, which was also supposed to stream coverage, buckled under the pressure.
With such as huge number of sites to choose from to get your World Cup fix, Mike Bromilow, country manager for UK, Middle East and Africa at Keynote Systems, says that companies face losing visitors to rival sites.
"It is inevitable that sites offering these services will see a huge influx of visitors during critical games of the tournament – especially those played during working hours – and it’s essential that the sites in question are able to deliver an optimal service without constant buffering and download errors," he said. "With so many rival companies providing these services, all web sites need to be aiming to achieve the quickest download times possible. If fans have to wait too long, they will quickly browse away to a competitor if the site is not performing as it should."
Image: mikkelz, Flickr, CC licence.
