WatchMouse finds poor site performance for many CAC40 listed companies - Surprisingly, Air France-KLM and France Telecom amongst the worst
22
May 2008

Utrecht, the Netherlands, 20 May 2008 - WatchMouse, a leader in website performance monitoring, tested the sites belonging to France’s CAC40 listed companies for errors, availability and performance. Five of the 40 monitored sites were found to have ‘serious user issues’. These sites belong to L’Oreal, France Telecom, Air France-KLM, Lagardere and Danone. Air France-KLM, Lagardere and Danone's sites were also found to have an uptime score, well below the accepted industry standards.


During the two month monitoring period, one of WatchMouse’s monitoring stations tried to access the homepage of the sites every five minutes. Sites were expected to download within 4 seconds without any errors. Combining the errors, speed (load time) and availability measurements, WatchMouse calculated a Site Performance Index 'SPI' for each of the sites. An SPI of ≤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’.

The poor SPI results of L’Oreal and France Telecom’s sites were due to very long load times while Air France-KLM, Lagardere and Donone’s sites were all found to have a significant number of errors, in-addition to very long load times.


WatchMouse CTO, Mark Pors said, “As a telecommunications company, we’d expect France Telecom to have all the knowledge, facilities and desire to build a fast and reliable site. We’re therefore very surprised that this research found the France Telecom site operating well below industry standards.”


WatchMouse also reports on site uptime. In line with industry standards, WatchMouse ranks a site’s uptime as ‘good’ if it is ≥99.9%, ‘OK’ if it between 99.89% - 99.01% and ‘poor’ if it is ≤99%. Mark Pors points out that “99% uptime sounds great but when you calculate it, this means 80+ hours of downtime a year. That’s one working day per month.”


Of the CAC40 monitored sites, those with poor uptime results belong to: Air Liquide, Carrefour, Schneider Electric, Veolia Environnement, Danone, Air France-KLM and Lagardere. Lagardere’s site scored 89% uptime meaning it was unavailable for more than three days during the period of monitoring.


A complete overview of the CAC40 monitoring results can be found at: http://www.watchmouse.com/SPI/2008/performance_CAC40_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