The results left much to be desired.
Keynote Competitive Research, which is the industry analysis group of Keynote Systems, measured the performance of 10 retail mobile Web sites during the busy holiday weeks of Nov. 18, 2009 to Jan. 4, 2010.
The 10 sites were Amazon.com, Barnes & Noble, Best Buy, Costco, Dell, Foot Locker, Musician's Friend, Sears, Target and Wal-Mart.
The study measured the download performance for three pages on each site: loading the mobile site's home page, searching for a product and retrieving information about a specific product.
Measurements for the Keynote study were taken from New York and San Francisco using data connections on the AT&T, Sprint, T-Mobile and Verizon Wireless cell phone networks.
Average load times for mobile home pages ranged from 8.3 seconds in the best case with Best Buy to 34.4 seconds in the worst case. Search results ranged from 4.5 seconds for Wal-Mart to 37.9 seconds. Product information ranged from 5.7 seconds with Foot Locker to 26.8 seconds.
"Wired Web [users] are used to much ... faster times and often expect pages to load in two seconds or less," said Ben Rushlo, senior manager of Web technologies at Keynote, in a statement.
He added: "Even the best mobile Web sites take two to three times as long as that despite being optimized heavily for ... mobile [phones]. The worst sites are taking [more than] half a minute on average to load each page."
The study also showed that mobile sites have much higher error rates than non-mobile sites. The overall range of availability was between 97.6 percent for Foot Locker to just 74.7 percent. Keynote says that consumers on the wired Web expect 99.5 percent or better availability.
As such, even the very best mobile Web sites are not fully meeting consumer expectations. Only two mobile Web sites in the study achieved an overall availability better than 90 percent and three Web sites were below 80 percent overall. More cell phone studies can be found here.
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