Paul Green, ecommerce business development manager at Summit, shares his view of good and bad sites.

Brantano.co.uk

Brantano.co.uk

Brantano has an extremely fast website. There is plenty of content on the site, but this is well managed with many images below 15KB with no loss in the visual quality of either product or banner displays.

The filters are simple to use and respond quickly to changes. Using ‘view all’ I could see nearly 200 results for formal shoes with the page taking just over a second to display.

Navigating through to the product page, I found plenty of alternative views of the shoes without the page slowing down.

The checkout is clean and simple, with no distractions or unnecessary use of banners. I’ll be ordering again.

Toysrus.co.uk

The Toys R Us website doesn’t perform quite so well. After trying .com and getting sent to the US site, I got back to the UK site eventually.

There are multiple external adverts in the header and footer, as well as a series of tracking codes within the site that slowed down the pages I visited.

Adding to basket from a listing page took more than five seconds, with the result from a product details page only slightly quicker.

The basket and checkout were very slow. Too many buttons, dropdowns and additional options were distracting and made the process difficult. I gave up when trying to choose a specific delivery day.