Mediaboss Marketing

Keynote Systems, the expert in internet and mobile cloud monitoring, monitors the top 11 UK social networking sites on a monthly basisand analyses how these sites perform compared to their competitors. By Robert Castley.

By Robert Castley

The homepages for the social media networks improved performance-wise in December compared to November. In terms of response time, the sites were 0.1 seconds faster, resulting in the average load time decreasing from 2.27 seconds 2.17 seconds. Reliability also improved and the successful load rate increased from 99.66 to 99.71 percent.

In particular, Pinterest and LinkedIn both improved the experience they offered to users. Pinterest saw its most significant improvement in response time, where the homepage took an average of 1.4 seconds to load in December compared to 1.53 seconds in November. For LinkedIn, reliability improved the most, increasing from 97.75 percent in November to 98.27 percent in December. LinkedIn is, however, still performing much worse than the other sites in terms of availability, as all the other sites are achieving at least the 99 percent recommended minimum load success rate month on month. Flicker was the only site to perform noticeably worse in December, as visitors were left waiting an additional 0.12 seconds for the site to load, amounting to 2.36 seconds total average load time. The site was also less reliable, falling from a 99.97 percent successful load rate in November to 99.51 percent in December.

It was great to see the social media sites performing so well during the busy Christmas period. For a good customer experience sites should load in under two seconds and correctly more than 99 percent of the time. Only one site failed to reach the 99 percent goal LinkedIn and the overall index average response rate became closer to the recommended two second mark 2.17 seconds in December. The site performance success over the Christmas period could be due to a couple of causes; the sites may have ramped up their capacity to cope with demand over Christmas, or perhaps this is an indication of social networking trends. There may have been less traffic to the social media sites during the Christmas period because people may have been more concerned with meeting friends and family in-person, and this would have reduced strain on the homepages. It will be interesting to see how the sites perform in January, when the seasonal Christmas pressure is off and many people return to work and university.

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Performance of social networking sites – Index from Keynote Systems for December 2013