Olympics website least robust of all key London 2012 sites, says traffic survey

The official London 2012 Olympics website has come last in five key tests carried out by technology performance company Compuware Corporation, raising fears that the site's infrastructure could "seriously impact its ability to meet user expectations".

BT-powered London2012.com requires 261 server requests to load the content of a single page, compared to only 36 in the case of independent Olympics site londonolympics2012.com.

This, said Compuware, indicates "inefficient content delivery" to the end-user in a given session, as well as added pressure on the server in general that could crash the site at times of increased traffic.

Average wait time on london2012.com before it begins downloading information to a visitor is 1.9 seconds, compared to lastminute.com's 0.04 second pause. While this could be connected to the server request issue, Compuware's report notes it could also indicate a "slow network connection" underpinning the Games' official site.

London2012.com also suffers from high JavaScript time – precious seconds spent crunching client-side JavaScript code – which averages out at 3.7 seconds per request, 3.3 seconds slower than londonolympic2012.com.

The site's total load time – for all of its content – comes to 12.2 seconds.

"The official Olympics website, london2012.com, which will arguably be the most frequently accessed site during the games, is the most prolific offender," said director of IT service management at Compuware, Michael Allen.

"A number of errors have been made in architecting the site. The user experience is not great at the moment, and the analysis shows it will only get worse as traffic to it increases."

Compuware will be utilising its Gomez testing benchmarks throughout the Games to monitor major Olympics sites as well as online news destinations.