2013 Q4 Consumer Finance Website Benchmark – new leaders of the pack

LONDON - Nov. 29, 2013 - PRLog -- Most of us now use finance websites regularly to check on the state of our bank balances, loans and credit cards, and even comparatively minor online problems can affect our user experience. When it comes to efficient working, not all consumer finance websites are the same.

It’s not just the major failures when websites go down that can inconvenience users - broken links, missing images, inaccessible pages and other errors regularly leave users frustrated and annoyed.

If a website doesn’t work properly, most users will not hang about composing a carefully worded email or spend hours on phone helplines – they will just go elsewhere to find a good online service that actually works.

That’s why the latest Sitemorse Index of more than 200 UK top consumer finance websites is important.

Our automated checks, covering quality, user experience, accessibility, performance and search engine optimisation, provide a key marker for leading companies in this sector.

Topping our list of high performing websites for the second quarter running, with 8.2 out of a possible ten marks, is the Leeds Building Society, one of the UK’s top ten societies and an organisation that can trace its roots back to 1845.

Second spot this time is taken by private banker Brown Shipley, which offers a UK-wide wealth management service aimed at both UK citizens and international investors.  Scoring 7.9/10 overall the bank rises two places in the table since our Q3 survey. Third-placed Dudley Building Society, which has a core philosophy of serving the communities in and around the ‘Black Country’ and UK West Midlands area, also rises two places in the Index with a score of 7.8/10. The Society has now been around for more than 150 years and in the last three has risen from the near bottom of our rankings to near top.

Website testing for the Index is undertaken by Sitemorse using automated software that, page-by-page, reads the first 125 pages of each site to generate a ranked table based on checks to the quality, user experience, accessibility, performance and search engine optimisation capability of each.

The top 20 ranking this time features no less than six new sites, so welcome to the websites of Syscap, Tesco Bank, Shore Capital, Duncan Lawrie Bank, the UK hub of India’s Bank of Baroda, and seventh-placed Advantage Finance, which is based in Grimsby. Advantage comes into the top ranking of our Index with a score of 7.3/10.

Our biggest improvers this time are the websites of Rabobank International (+63), Investec Asset Management (+66),  Bank of England (up 85 places, to 50th overall),  Cambridge Building Society (up 87 to 42^nd overall), and top climber the Yorkshire Building Society , which rises 100 places in the Index to take 30^th place overall.

The importance of an accessible website

Around 15% of European citizens of working age, or 80 million people, have a disability or some form of functional limitation. Both that real number and the percentage will grow as the European population continues to age. Today we live much of our life online and websites are critically important to our daily life.

Websites that can’t be navigated by disabled users, apart from being illegal, may discriminate against users.

Julian Hodge Bank’s website and that of the Leeds Building Society score highest in this sector on accessibility, scoring 9/10, with Intelligent Finance and John Charcol scoring 8/10.

It’s important that websites respond quickly, and we think a response time longer than 0.75 seconds for a web page can have a negative effect on user experience. Fastest performers in our Index were the websites of Numis Securities, Barclaycard, the European Bank, HSBC Private Bank, and One Account, with the latter two responding in 0.01 seconds, on average.

About the Index

The quarterly Index Website Review, powered by the Sitemorse software platform, is an important independent benchmark that clearly shows how websites are performing, meeting compliance levels and satisfying their users. It’s also a key indicator for website managers who, while always wanting to be at the top of their game, could be hampered by poor-performing suppliers, non-compliant legacy content or content management systems that often fail to spot errors affecting user experience.

Sitemorse services such as Governisation and the Web Management Toolkit immediately find the issues that affect web users the most on any web presence, help demonstrate real improvement and ensure you have control and confidence in your web presence.

They will help you minimise unnecessary risk, issues covering everything from compliance with web standards to helping you deal with malware, protect your brand across even a large web presence, and enhance search engine optimisation to help more potential customers find you. They can help spotlight content that may need updating, issues with staff training and support, and focus supplier management. We offer a confidential internal ‘company wide' website testing and benchmarking service - allowing you to review the position of all the sites in your organisation. Contact us to request further details and / or an example.

More information

More information about our surveys and what they test can be found on our website http://www.sitemorse.com/survey/

For further Information: Geoff Paddock, Head of Communications on +44 207 183 5588gpaddock@Sitemorse.com