Websites of top ASX companies unreliable, new report claims

Only two of the websites of the top 50 companies on the ASX200 have managed to record 100% uptime during the past months, with Wesfarmers, Crown and Tabcorp among the worst performers, tracking company WatchMouse has revealed.

The results indicate SMEs need to be vigilant in ensuring their websites are up and running at all times, as major search engines including Google will ignore sites which are constantly unreliable, an SEO expert has said.

WatchMouse claimed that its study revealed only two websites managed to register 100% uptime, with Macquarie Group and News Corporation taking the top honours. CFS Retail Property Trust and Rio Tinto came in second place with 99.9% each.

However, Wesfarmers was claimed as the worst performer of the lot, recording a shocking 36.2% uptime. Crown Limited also recorded just 61.5%, with Tabcorp at 90.6%.

WatchMouse said that availability equal or great than 99.9% was regarded as “good”, and anything below that figure regarded as “poor”.

“These are the largest public companies in Australia and only four of their websites met the industry standard of 99.9% uptime or greater, and Wesfarmers with only 36% uptime is abysmal,” Mark Pors, co-founder of WatchMouse, said in a statement.

The study checked the sites every five minutes during the test period from one of its 42 monitoring stations. The home page was expected to load within eight seconds without any errors, and if that was exceeded, or an error occurred, another monitoring station was used. If a second connect error was recorded, that result was counted as “poor availability” or “unavailable”.

“We also noted in our research of 10 other global market indexes that Australia ranked at the bottom of the list when it came to website uptimes.”

Other poor performers included Woolworths at 93.9%, Lend Lease at 96.5% and AXA Asia Pacific at 97.27%. Businesses with more reliable websites included Qantas at 99.61% uptime, Foster’s at 99.6% and Coca-Cola Amatil at 99.48%.

Stewart Media chief executive Jim Stewart says the results aren’t good enough, and that businesses must ensure their websites are operating fully at all times to ensure good SEO results.

“We go through the same processes with all of our clients, and one of our first checks is to see what hosting company they are with. We set up a monitoring service on their site, because most companies don’t do that on their own.”
“And of course, the sites that aren’t ranking very well and the ones with really crappy uptimes. It might not even by down, it might just have a really slow response rate, and that is keeping them down.”

Stewart says businesses must work with their SEO teams to ensure their sites are being monitored at all times and that the least bit of downtime is remedied immediately.

“Make sure your hosting company is monitoring your uptime. One day off a year would be normal for a good website, but hosting companies get resold and recut so many times you may not know what’s going on, but you have to.”

“Back in the 1990s if you had five seconds of downtime it was the end of the world, but now it doesn’t seem to matter so much for some reason. Sites do constantly go off and on the air, but you need to manage that and make sure it’s reliable.”