Compuware Corporation has launched new website performance benchmarks for the credit card industry. According to the US Credit Card Last Mile benchmark results for September, website page load time ranged from 3.7 to 14.8 seconds, revealing a wide gap in website performance among the top credit card issuers.

According to a comScore online credit card report, 76 percent of cardholders have logged on to an account from their issuer's website. With more cardholders considering issuer websites as their leading method for engagement, providing satisfying online customer experiences has never been more important. A key component in providing an exceptional customer experience is providing fast and reliable website performance.

The US Credit Card Last Mile benchmark measures performance from the end user's desktop taking into account the impact of bandwidth, content delivery networks (CDNs), and local Internet Service Providers (ISPs). The Compuware Gomez Last Mile Benchmarks leverage the Gomez Global Performance Testing Network of more than 150,000 desktop computers connected to 2,500 local ISPs in over 168 countries around the globe. Other benchmarks for the credit card industry include the US Credit Card transaction benchmark and the US Credit Card home page benchmark which has been expanded to include six new participants.

"Research from Forrester revealed that credit card providers have one of highest correlations between customer experience and loyalty. If you provide a good customer experience, your customers will continue to use your card for future purchases. If your customer experience is poor, your customers will switch their business to a competitor," said Jonathan Ranger, Gomez Benchmark Practice Director at Compuware. "Website performance is a critical piece in providing top customer experiences and satisfaction for credit card issuers."

Gomez Benchmarks are an impartial, quantitative measurement of comparative web and mobile site performance and rank the web and mobile performance of companies across three key metrics:

* Response Time — measures the time elapsed while downloading a page or an entire multistep transaction process.

* Availability — measures the percentage of successfully completed tests out of total test attempts for the measurement period.

* Consistency — measures the standard deviation of the response time of successful tests completed.

Benchmarks are used by organizations to compare and track performance against competitors and market leaders; baseline and track performance over time; and as key indicators of success for business and IT site owners. Gomez publishes hundreds of global web and mobile performance benchmarks based on more than 20 million monthly tests across 3,000 companies in 13 countries and include:

* Home Page Backbone Benchmarks: measure the performance of the website's home page from the Internet Backbone.

* Home Page Last Mile Benchmarks: measure the performance of the home page from the end user's desktop taking into account the real user's connection speed.

* Transaction Benchmarks: measure the performance of a key business process such as ordering a product or making a stock trade.

* Mobile Benchmarks: measure the performance of mobile site's home page on the largest carriers and top devices.

The Gomez platform is the industry's leading solution for optimizing the performance of web, non-web, mobile, streaming and cloud applications. Driven by end-user experience, Gomez provides a unified view across the entire application delivery chain, from a user's browser or mobile device, across the Internet or a corporate WAN, in the cloud, to inside the data center, eliminating blind spots from the First Mile to the Last Mile.