Westpac responsive online

Westpac's website response times have blitzed the competition - proving 12 times faster than NAB's and 100 times faster than RaboPlus' Australian website.

Releasing the first Gomez Web Performance Benchmark yesterday, software company Compuware said that it had contacted all the 16 banks surveyed ahead of releasing the data - but only two of the big four had elected to make contact in advance of the survey's release. They may now have to rethink, given some of the banks' poor performances.

Westpac topped the list with a 0.16 second average response time and 100 per cent uptime for the month from 7 May to 7 June. Adelaide and St George Banks ranked second and third.

ANZ came in at fourth slot with a 1.35-second response time, CBA at seventh on 1.74 seconds. NAB performed worst of the four majors with a response time of 2.04 seconds and was the only one of the four to suffer website downtime during the month, with availability ranked at 99.75 per cent.

Compuware argued website response times were important to organisations, citing research from the Aberdeen Group which found that a one-second delay in response time for web users led to a 16 per cent drop in customer satisfaction. It said that internet search engine Bing had also found that a two-second slowdown translated into a 4.3 per cent reduction in revenue per user.

Among the banks surveyed, RaboPlus came at the bottom with a 16.54 second average response time, and just 98.46 percent availability.

This first benchmarking survey focussed purely on website response times - but Compuware plans to benchmark the speed of online banking transactions in the future. It said it will also benchmark the banks' website responses each month.