Election day results are in! – Well, for candidate website speed and performance, that is… We monitored the performance of presidential candidate websites from Nov. 1 to Nov 6, for speed and uptime in this year’s Romney vs Obama 2012 contest using an Internet Explorer (IE) browser from eight USA-based locations at 15-minute intervals. During that time the amount of user traffic to the websites of Barack Obama and Mitt Romney likely increased. (Measure the speed of the candidates’ websites yourself free here)
Campaign websites, like the campaigns themselves, have spikes and valleys similar to Romney’s popularity and the President Obama approval rating. Our review of the President Obama website and Mitt Romney website is focused on how the candidate’s balance the design of their campaign websites with the need for speed at their campaign websites.
Barack Obama Website
The Obama campaign site, with over 200 page elements and over 50 external hosts, has an average response time of 9.7 seconds. There were three errors (see below, red lines on Nov. 1, 3, and 6) noted for the President Obama campaign site resulting from third party hosts that had error conditions when our browser attempted to pull those elements from the third party servers.
As noted above, average response time for the Obama campaign site varied based on the time of day with slower load times occurring in the middle of the day from 10 am to 2 pm.
Mitt Romney Website
As noted below, the much simpler Mitt Romney website, with just 24 page elements and four third party hosts, had an average response time of 3.1 seconds during the week. As you can see there were spikes throughout the week including November 3 and November 4 with spikes in the 8-9 second range.
As you can see above, during the testing period the Mitt Romney website also had its slowest response time during the middle of the day, between 11:am and 1:00pm.
Romney vs Obama Website Summary
On the one hand, Obama’s website is “bigger” and more complex with many more web page elements and external-based hosts. On the other hand, Romney’s website is faster loading than Obama’s. However, finding the right BALANCE of website speed and design is the key. Getting it right often comes down to your personal perspective. Who do you think got it right, and WHY? (Measure the speed of the candidates’ websites yourself free here)
– Election Day Results – Website Speed Romney vs Obama –
