Bank websites lift game in July

Web performance improvements at Citibank, Macquarie Bank and Rabobank have brought the average response time of Australian bank websites under two seconds for the first time.

Compuware this week released results of its third monthly banking website audit, indicating the online response times, availability and consistency of 14 major Australian banks in July.

Nine of the 14 banks achieved 100 percent availability, resulting in an average availability of 99.94 percent - up from the 99.75 percent average in Compuware's inaugural May 2010 audit.

Although its availability had only dropped 0.01 points to 99.73 percent, ING Direct had the lowest availability of July owing to improvements at the Commonwealth Bank, Citibank, RaboBank, ANZ Bank and the Bank of Queensland.

Westpac continued to lead across all categories, maintaining a 0.16 second response and improving its consistency (standard deviation of response times) from 0.10 to 0.076.

RaboBank, whose data centres are located in Europe, improved its response time most significantly from 16.54 seconds to 4.893 seconds.

According to Rafi Katanasho, Compuware's application performance management solutions director, this was due to a configuration change in its content delivery network (CDN).

"There was a misconfiguration in the CDN that was slowing down the website," he told iTnews, explaining that a functional CDN equipped RaboBank with a local cache so it could serve some information faster.

Other areas for improvement could be interactions with third-party advertisement, content providers or analytics systems, Katanasho suggested.

Overall, July's 1.987 second average response time was an improvement over June's result of 2.557 seconds, and May's average response time of 3.11 seconds.

"July was the first month in which the average Response Time Rating across all 14 banks was better than two seconds, thanks to continuing performance improvements by key banks," Katanasho said.

"That is good news for banking customers who, in general, get frustrated if it takes more than two seconds to get an online response."