• by Ross Fadner , December 18, 2003

With all of the seemingly bigger issues surrounding the business of Web publishing, it's almost taken for granted that the basic mechanics of a site are supposed to work properly, but many publishers would be surprised to learn that one in seven home pages of well-known consumer sites recently failed a simple link integrity test conducted by Jupiter Research. While the causes were myriad - ranging from broken links to server errors to links to nonexistent sites - the results were the same: the errors were severe enough to cause visitors to "defect" from the page, according to findings of the study, which was released Wednesday by Jupiter.

In all, Jupiter Research tested more than 22,000 links - more than half of which were routed through manual "redirect" or tracking scripts - to measure consumer behavior, a tactic especially prone to generating errors.

Given these results, it's not surprising that a recent executive survey conducted by Jupiter found that the No. 1 challenge facing web site operators is improving site usability. Nearly half (49 percent) of site executives ranked that challenge as a greater priority than the challenge of budget constraints (47 percent) or measuring a site's ROI (40 percent).

Perhaps most shocking is the fact that Jupiter found these home page failures occurring on some fairly established sites, not a bunch of fly-by-night operations. "If you picked a dozen sites you use every day, 90 percent of them would have been in the panel," said Matthew Berk, research director and one of the authors of the Jupiter report entitled "Managing Web Site Quality: Stanching Consumer Defection."

Based on the one in seven failure rate, Jupiter estimates that at least 80 percent of web sites have errors severe enough to undermine visitors' confidence and cause them to turn elsewhere.

"Despite the high priority of improving site usability, the basics of website operations having error-free pages, consumer-friendly messaging, and navigation that makes sense require putting yourself in the visitor's shoes, a fact only indirectly served by traditional quality assurance," asserted David Schatsky, senior vice president of research at Jupiter.

In order to "stanch" consumer defection, the report recommends that sites operated by more than 12 full-time employees with more than 1,000 pages should deploy consumer-centric quality controls.