Screwfix website ranks bottom in Sitemorse's Q1 'retail top 500'

New results released by analytics website Sitemorse ranks the DIY retailer's website as the worst retail site in the UK in terms of accessibility, broken links, quality, performance and SEO capability in 2012 Q1.

Sitemorse uses automated software to rank the websites based on their first 125 pages. Furniture and floor covering retailers performed particularly well, with DFS Furniture ranking number one, closely followed by Pownall Carpets in fifth place, up one since Q4 2011.

Fired Earth topped the chart for the DIY sector, ranking 9th with an overall score of 7.82. High marks were given for the site's function, performance and email facilities, although it lost points for 100% of its pages showing some form of code failure.

For garden centres the Garden Centre Group (formerly known as Wyevale) put in the strongest web presence, with a ranking of 7th, up 16 places since last quarter.

DIY giants B&Q and Homebase trailed towards the bottom of the league table, meanwhile. B&Q's ranking of 378 was up 68 points from its last result, but the website scored zero points for its function and accessibility.

At 446 Homebase did even worse, with 0 and 1 scores for function and accessibility and 100% of its pages showing code errors. Its score was 82 points lower than its previous ranking.

With a result of just 0.84 points out of 10, Screwfix's drop of 49 places since last quarter put the website firmly at the bottom of the table. 100% of its pages had untagged PDFs, code failures and 'A' fails on its pages.

Sitemorse also ranked the websites in terms of 'click and wait' times, saying a response time which is more than 0.75 seconds can have a negative effect on user experience. The slowest ranking website belonged to Conran Shop Holdings, whose slowest time was 85.43 seconds.

Screwfix ranked 15th slowest, with an average slowest waiting time of 16.40 seconds. The longest recorded time on its website was 37.49 seconds.

Wickes, meanwhile was pinpointed by the statistics as having the 'poorest code quality' on its website, with a reported 544,832 failures.

Source : DIY Week
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