SBC News Voice of the Sports Betting Industry
Analysis by Catchpoint has suggested that major UK online bookmakers ‘failed to deliver on web performance and digital experience’ at this year’s Grand National.
The digital performance intelligence firm monitored the performance of top UK betting sites including bet365, Sky Bet, Ladbrokes and Paddy Power in the run-up to and on the day of the big race.
Gamebookers trailed the field, with pages taking eight seconds to load, which is longer than the standard for online retail home pages at 3 to 4 seconds. Paddy Power came in at six seconds.
Before the race, which was won by One For Arthur, the average time most bookies took to load a full page so that people can start placing bets exceeded four seconds. This can be explained by the presence of large volumes of data and applications that take too long to load.
Robert Castley, Senior ePrformance Engineer at Catchpoint, said: “Online betting websites usually have complex technical platforms that include in-house and third-party software to serve the highly dynamic websites especially at time-sensitive events like horse races.
“The Grand National is perhaps one of the most popular events for betting and is an example of where gaming sites must cope with extraordinary surges of traffic. So, keeping your site up and running and performing well on the high-stakes race day is at the heart of whether your online betting business flourishes.
“Unfortunately, on Saturday UK betting sites did not maintain a good standard and most pages took considerably longer to load than is acceptable in our digital consumer economy. Whether this frustrated someone placing the winning bet may never be known, but we hope the industry learns from this year and runs a faster digital Grand National next year.”
Catchpoint’s tips for maintaining site performance include reviewing how third-party apps like social media plug-ins or multimedia can impact digital experience while applying image and HTML compression to make websites smaller and thus run faster.
The company also said it’s important that mobile sites test and control APIs, and that CDN/hosting providers can handle expected traffic and protect a business from distributed denial of service attacks.
