Virgin F1 racing team’s site has the best online performance

Posted on Jul 12 2011 - 3:43pm by Robert

A study by Keynote Systems revealed that Virgin Racing takes the top position with online performance, while the Williams website struggled because of its flash rich content.

Keynote Systems, the world’s leader in Internet and mobile cloud monitoring, tracked the performance of the home pages of Formula 1 teams using real browser monitoring every important race weekends. This week, Keynote monitored the websites of ten F1 teams that participated in the 2011 British Grand Prix at Silverstone, with its measurements taken from locations around the world.

The company monitored the sites of Force India, Ferrari, GP, Hispania, McLaren, Lotus, Mercedes GP, Virgin, Williams and Red Bull.

According to the results, Virgin was revealed to be the top performing website with an average success rate of 99.96 percent and a response time of 2.75 seconds, while Force India took the second spot with 99.82 percent. The Williams site came in last place with a 84.48 percent success rate and an average download speed of 28.52 seconds, almost 26 seconds slower than Virgin’s.

“It’s inevitable that Formula 1 sites will receive a vastly increased number of visitors during race weekends,” said the Keynote Systems Lead Solutions Consultant Robert Castley. “Many of the sites monitored struggled with load times this weekend and that’s likely to be caused by the amount of rich content and live feeds that are displayed on many of the home pages. The Williams site has numerous large flash files making the homepage over 8Mb. Similarly, the Mclaren site offers a live feed throughout the race weekend which is likely to vastly slow down the page loading.”

“While rich content is attractive to consumers, and to advertisers, it’s important that this content isn’t included to the detriment of the overall site performance. Content providers should think about the real end-user perspective when designing their site, and should understand how flash files and heavy sites will impact the overall performance. Only two of the sites monitored, Virgin and Mercedes, achieved download times of less than ten seconds, yet this should be a realistic goal for all sites. Content providers need to ensure that fans are able to access useful timely team information during practice, qualifying and the race, however this is impossible if they’re being made to wait almost half a minute to access the home page.”

So at least the Virgin Racing website is fast 😉

1 Comment so far. Feel free to join this conversation.

  1. Laura July 13, 2011 at 9:41 am - Reply

    Es curioso que se hagan esos exámenes tan exahustivos de las webs de las escuderías de F1… Es increíble lo popular que se ha hecho la fórmula 1 en unos pocos años.

    Mirad esto qué chulo, se ha hecho una especie de canal de Youtube para un concurso también de F1. Parece que de ahí saldrán bastantes vídeos divertidos http://www.youtube.com/formulasantander

Leave A Response