Gomez Benchmarks are an independent and comprehensive scorecard of web and mobile site performance.

The Gomez Benchmarks test thousands of the largest companies with the most trafficked web sites across many industries. They are an impartial, quantitative measurement of comparative web and mobile site performance that provides context for decision making on performance optimization strategies and goals. The Gomez Benchmarks are based on millions of measurements and monitor site availability, response time and consistency over time on key customer interaction points. Gomez Benchmarks are published in more than 20 countries.

Gomez Benchmarks measure response time, availability and consistency at regular intervals throughout the business day from multiple locations.

• Response Time — Measures the end-to-end time elapsed while downloading each web page or an entire multistep transaction process. This includes the base HTML page and any referenced objects, third-party content, JavaScript and CSS and other web content. The reported metric represents the average time required to download the home page or execute the multistep transaction without factoring in user latency.
• Availability — Measures the percentage of successfully completed tests out of total test attempts for the period. Availability rates are dependent upon variables such as the ability of our testing agent to access the web site, its ability to process a transaction without error and its ability to download each step of the transaction within a reasonable 60-second time frame.
• Consistency — Measures the standard deviation of the response times of successful tests. The goal is to have a low number (in seconds), which indicates how consistent the response time is each time a user visits a web site. Highly variable response times indicate inconsistent performance that may be caused by poor web-site performance as measured across diverse geographies, issues with Internet peering or an under-powered technical architecture, which leads to slowdowns during periods of peak traffic.
• Frequency and Location of Tests — Our home page backbone and transactional benchmarks test from 12 geographically dispersed co-location facilities across multiple network providers within the U.S at regular 15-, 30- or 60-minute intervals throughout each business day.

Gomez Benchmarks measure key customer interaction points.

• Home Page Benchmarks — Measure the performance of the web site’s front door — the home page — from 150 high-bandwidth Internet backbone locations.
• Home Page Last Mile Benchmarks — Measure home page performance from the end user’s desktop taking into account the real user’s connection speed. These benchmarks leverage the Gomez network of 150,000 desktop computers connected to 2,500 local ISPs in more than 168 countries around the globe.
• Transaction Benchmarks — Measure the performance of a key business process such as ordering a product or making a stock trade.
• Mobile Benchmarks — Measure mobile site home page performance across the largest carriers on the most popular devices.