UK parcel carriers had a “good online Christmas”

UK parcel carriers had a “good online Christmas”, according to newly-released analysis from Catchpoint, as “unseasonably warm weather and better preparation” helped to reduce delivery problems and websites were geared up to respond to the order tracking rush. Catchpoint’s analysis indicated that the major UK parcel carriers seem to have coped well with customer traffic to their homepages.

“Their homepages where customers can track their deliveries have responded well to demand with no outages or serious slowdowns,” said Catchpoint. “However, there are some strong variations in web performance between some carriers.”

Catchpoint monitored the homepages of eight carriers – DHL, DPD, Fedex, Parcel2Go, Parcelforce, TNT, UPS, Yodel – and how quickly their homepages responded and completed.  The fastest were Parcelforce and Yodel in 2.5 seconds but Parcel2Go was consistently the slowest responding at 8.4 seconds.

According to Catchpoint, the “ideal” speed is two seconds to provide a completed page for the consumer to then start checking their delivery status.

Commenting on the findings Robert Castley, Senior Performance Engineer, Catchpoint said: “None of the carriers monitored managed to break the two-second webpage response time during the Christmas period. The homepages remained heavy over 1Mb in size and mainly due to non-optimised images for web delivery. Interestingly, Yodel, who fared well over the period have now since January 3rd  swelled the size of their homepage to 8MB and seen their page load times lengthen from 2.5 seconds to 18 seconds. This demonstrates that continuous monitoring is necessary to ensure you remain on top of your game if these carriers are to deliver a great customer experience online consistently.”