Ranking of EURO 2008 nations' sports sites - France the online winner!

Utrecht, the Netherlands, 19th June 2008 - WatchMouse, a leader in website performance monitoring, monitored the most popular sports sites, belonging to each of the Euro 2008 nations. Combining the errors, speed (load time) and availability measurements, WatchMouse calculated a Site Performance Index (SPI) for each of the sites, to reveal that the nations with the best sports sites are France, Spain and the Netherlands. Sports enthusiasts in Turkey may be disappointed by confirmation that their nation’s favorite sports site ranks as the worst, largely due to long load times.

WatchMouse’s monitoring stations tried to access the homepage of each nations' favorite sports site every five minutes. With no errors, 100% availability and a load time of less than 4 seconds, France's www.lequipe.fr ranked as the best sports site with an enviably low SPI of 203, while Spain's www.marca.com narrowly took second place over the Dutch www.vi.nl. Of the 16 monitored sites, only Turkey’s spor.ekolay.net and Austrian’s www.krone.at/sport were found to have 'serious user issues'.

WatchMouse CTO, Mark Pors said, “We're very pleased to find that many of the Euro 2008 nations have sports sites that function really well. We hope that as we continue monitoring, we'll see Turkey's national sports site improve as dramatically as their game did on Sunday!"

    Euro 2008 Sport Sites League Table:

    Rank              Country Site                              SPI

    1. France          http://www.lequipe.fr                    203

    2. Spain           http://www.marca.com                     478

    3. Netherlands     http://www.vi.nl                         488

    4. Croatia         http://sportskenovosti.hr                653

    5. Germany         http://www.sportbild.de                  657

    6. Italy           http://www.gazzetta.it                   767

    7. Switzerland     http://www.blink.ch/sport                785

    8. Czech Republic  http://www.sportovninoviny.cz            838

    9. Greece          http://www.sport24.gr                   1000

    10. Sweden         http://www.aftonbladet.se/sportbladet   1051

    11. Poland         http://www.sport.pl                     1169

    12. Russia         http://www.russiatoday.ru/sports        1275

    13. Portugal       http://www.abola.pt                     1214

    14. Romania        http://www.gsp.ro                       1486

    15. Austria        http://www.krone.at/sport               2041

    16. Turkey         http://spor.ekolay.net                  2796

Since monitoring started on 11 June 2008, one of WatchMouse’s monitoring stations has tried to access the homepage of each of the 16 sites, every five minutes. Sites are expected to download within 4 seconds without any errors. Combining the errors, speed (load time) and availability measurements, WatchMouse calculated a SPI for each of the sites. An SPI of less than 1,000 represents a ‘well performing’ site, 1,001 - 1,999 is regarded as ‘acceptable’, while a score of above 2,000 represents a site with ‘serious user issues’.

A complete overview of the Euro2008 monitoring results can be found at: http://www.watchmouse.com/SPI/2008/performance_EURO08_sites.php

About WatchMouse

Companies can easily monitor the performance of their web sites using WatchMouse's monitoring service. WatchMouse has thousands of customers in over 70 countries and checks from 25+ locations and networks worldwide (see www.watchmouse.com/)

Contact: Mark Pors, mark@watchmouse.com, +31302522400