Tory website 'worst performing political site'

The Conservative party website had the worst page download speed among the UK's leading political parties in March, with pages taking an average of 24.78 seconds to load, according to tests run by online usability company Site Confidence.

This was significantly slower than both the Labour party's site and the Liberal Democrats who had average download speeds of 12.06 seconds and a speedy 6.24 seconds respectively.

The Liberal Democrats were also well under the desired 10-second benchmark for download time.

The Tory site did have 100 per cent availability during March, however, whereas Labour's was down for a total of one hour and 13 minutes over the month. The Lib Dems experienced four minutes and 19 seconds of downtime.

Conservatives.com was recently praised by the BBC for its creative use of social media and for out-performing its rivals in terms of "positive online sentiment".

Bob Dowson, director at Site Confidence, said: "An average download speed of in excess of 20 seconds, as recorded for the Conservatives site in March, is very poor. The threshold for sites such as this should be 10 seconds.

"However, running up to the general election, when there is a much greater need for the public to be able to access policy information, parties should aim for even quicker response times," Dowson continued.

The news comes as Google announced that it has started ranking sites higher based on page loading speeds.

Meanwhile, online news platform Fingertips.net, which lets people customise their own online newspaper, has launched a specialised general election page which gives all the election news from a wide range of sources.