Website review: Endsleigh travel insurance site slow to land

Internal content and third-party applications appear to have been the cause of slow web performance for Endsleigh Insurance’s travel insurance website landing page.

Compuware evaluated Endsleigh’s web performance between 18 July and 20 August using Gomez’s performance benchmark, which comprises 22 similar landing pages.

It revealed Endsleigh’s landing page took approximately 4.31 seconds to load, placing it second from the bottom in the benchmark, above Prudential (13.28 seconds) and below Money Supermarket.com (2.93 seconds).

In comparison, the quickest three sites were Admiral (0.41 seconds), Cornhill Direct (0.64 seconds) and Swiftcover (0.71 seconds).

Endsleigh achieved a competitive availability score and was available 99.87% of the time users tried to access it. However, the analysis identified Endsleigh did have some issues with internal content loading and ‘first byte times’, which were also slow and took more than four seconds to load, giving the impression the site wasn’t available.

Last mile performance is typically slower than the internet backbone as performance is measured by end users. Again, the site was the second slowest, with a page load speed of 7.15 seconds. Confused was placed above it with a score of 6.03 seconds while Prudential sat below Endsleigh with its site load speed (16.09 seconds).

The quickest three sites were: Admiral (1.36 seconds), Aviva (1.62 seconds) and The Co-operative Insurance (1.73 seconds). On this occasion Endsleigh achieved an availability score of 99.51%, placing it sixth in the table according to this measure.

The top five available sites were: Direct Line (99.59%), The Co-operative Insurance (99.54%), GoCompare (99.54%), Aviva (99.51%) and Saga (99.51%).

Endsleigh’s page loaded effectively across all the major internet browsers and mobile devices in the market. However, it appears Endsleigh does not have a mobile version of its site and so it might be worthwhile evaluating whether it would warrant developing one for customers.

This article was published in the 17 October 2013 edition of Post magazine