September's top 50 online retailers

According to Sitemore, who published the top 50 online retailers for September, Mothercare, one of the UK's most successful retailers, came at the bottom of the list and was labeled the worst performing site, according to tests undertaken for The Retail Bulletin. The Marks & Spencer website had the most functional failings whereas Anne Summers lingerie had the fastest response time. The list of sites tested has been created jointly by The Retail Bulletin and specialist website testing company Sitemorse that used its automated testing of the first 125 pages of each retailer’s site to generate a ranked table.

Mothercare has a problem with broken links and its most glaring error is a strange failure to link to the company’s own jobs section and to the site of sister company. It also suffers from poor scores in all the other areas tested by Sitemorse.

A strong performer was Debenhams, which saw the retailer move up 23 places to second spot with a credible score of 6.54 although this was not good enough to displace DFS from retaining its place at the top of the table with a score of 6.98. This kept it on top of things despite it being a significantly lower score than the impressive 9.70 it achieved last month.

Sitemorse checks compliance, measures performance and tests function of your websites, by reading content, checking code and reviewing infrastructure to reduce risk caused by on-line failure. From single page monitoring to a complete site review, Sitemorse provides both management summaries and detailed technical reports.

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