10-04-2008 Tote site ranked worst in WatchMouse test

The Tote’s site was found to be the worst performer of 23 UK online gambling websites in tests carried out by WatchMouse on Grand National day (April 5) and the 10 days prior to it.

WatchMouse co-founder Mark Pors stated: "As one in three British adults bets on the Grand National, we anticipated that the UK's gambling companies would strive to provide their customers with a fast, error free sites. I am therefore surprised that in the lead up to this important betting event, our testing found the sites of some major gambling companies to be operating well below accepted industry standards."

During the testing period, WatchMouse's monitoring stations attempted to access the UK gambling sites every five minutes, with the expectation that they would load error-free within 4 seconds.

A Site Performance Index (SPI) was calculated for each site, using measurements based on errors, speed and availability. Well-performing sites scored SPIs below 1,000. Acceptable sites scored SPIs of 1,001 - 1,999. Sites with serious user issues were identified with SPIs in excess of 2,000.

WatchMouse found that the Tote’s site had serious user issues with long load times leading to a SPI of 2,854.
Stan James (1,792), William Hill (1,655) and Blue Square (1,615) experienced slow load times and only managed acceptable SPI scores as a result. Well-performing sites scoring SPIs below 1000 included Bet365, Betfair, Eurobet, Betfred and Canbet.

The entire SPI results of the WatchMouse’s tests can be accessed here.