The best (and worst) performing car manufacturer websites

Load times of websites of car manufacturers

From doing the research to the actual test drive, buying a new car is both an exciting and frustrating experience. Most people will have done hours of research into the vehicle they want to buy long before they ever set foot onto a car lot. So how do these websites perform when people are looking to make one of the biggest purchases of their life? We wanted to know, so we monitored the websites of 50 of the biggest car manufacturers in the world over a period of 6 days.

When it comes to uptime these companies had some of the best we’ve ever seen. Of the 50 companies monitored, only 7 dropped below 100%, and of those 7 not a single one went below 99%. In fact, the most downtime we saw for a single site was just 11.1 minutes spread out over 6 days. Needless to say, these websites were prepared for their customers.

This data was gathered by monitoring the websites from 103 different checkpoints spread across the United States and Europe. When one found that a website was down, the error was confirmed from a second location. The front pages of these websites were monitored, and scheduled maintenance periods were not taken into account.

So the uptime was overall pretty good. How about for performance?

What were the slowest performing websites?

Website Performance
SsangYoung 13.00 seconds
Nissan 12.99 seconds
Lexus 7.76 seconds
Morgan 6.58 seconds
Jaguar 5.63 seconds

The Full Page Check we used monitored the websites using a real web browser. Every data element and script that ran across the web page was documented. In some cases, a user can interact with the website while elements are still being loaded.

Powered by a waterfall chart, we found out that longer load times were caused by requested images that didn’t exist anymore (we’ve seen 404’s and 502’s), elements that loaded particularly slow, or scripts from social networks that took forever to load.

What were the fastest websites?

Website Performance
Audi 1.03 seconds
BMW 1.38 seconds
Opel 1.44 seconds
Rolls Royce 1.56 seconds
Volvo 1.72 seconds

Just like the high octane acceleration many of these companies promise, these websites proved that they had blazing fast speeds on the internet as well as on the highway.

In order to get an accurate reporting base, we only used checkpoints located in the United States and across Europe. If you’re interested in website monitoring on a more global scale, we operate 144 checkpoints across 6 continents.

Interested in monitoring your own websites today? You can try us free with a 30 day trial!

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