Report: CBS News Top-Performing Media Site, MSNBC Most Improved

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CBS News was named the top media Web site in 2010, followed by Yahoo News and The New York Times, according to an annual report rating sites based on actual Web performance rather than content.

The awards handed out by Gomez, a unit of Compuware that specializes in Web optimization, are based on three basic criteria: how fast a home page loads, how reliably it loads, and how consistently it loads across different locations, networks and times of day.

As part of its ongoing benchmarking, Gomez monitors more than 3,000 Web and mobile sites with more than 20 million tests conducted on a network of 150 Internet backbone locations and 150,000 desktop computers across the U.S.

In addition to media, Gomez named best-performing sites in several other categories.

Among them, Regions Bank had the top banking site; Fidelity took top honors among online brokers; United Health had the top health site; consumer electronics dealer Newegg was tops in retail; and Delta was No. 1 among airline sites.

MSNBC was cited as the most improved media site, improving its page load time 39%.

On the mobile side, where Web browsing can be especially frustrating, Gomez also named the top sites in certain categories. Capital One had the best-performing mobile site in banking; U.S. News & World Report, media; QVC, retail; and JetBlue, travel.

Gomez introduced the awards last year as a way to highlight how Web performance can affect the user experience, which in turn can impact a company's online business.

One study spotlighted in the report suggested that better site performance can boost conversions. It involved 33 major retail sites and over 3 million page views, and showed that when page load time improved from 8 to 2 seconds, "non-commerce" conversions went up 74%. Another Gomez study showed that the rate at which people abandon sites rises in accord with slower load times.

As more media consumption and shopping extends to mobile devices, the Gomez report argues that optimizing Web sites for smaller screens becomes all the more important. But it also points out that 60% of mobile Web users had a problem in the past year when trying to access sites on their phone.

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