Tories an anti-scottish party’

Nationalists first past the post in war of websites

THE SNP’S website is the best performing among six of the major parties, while Ukip’s is the slowest, according to reliability tests by web experts.

Nicola Sturgeon’s party was found to have the site that performed the best when tested on the average response time to load, and it also topped the chart for webpage availability – which measured how often the website of each party successfully loaded.

The analysis, which was carried out by app performance management firm Dynatrace, ran hourly tests on the websites of the Conservatives, Liberal Democrats, Labour, Ukip and the Green Party, as well as the SNP in order to complete the research. The six sites were then benchmarked against one another.

The response time test – which recorded how long it took a homepage to load – saw the SNP come top with an average response time of 3.38 seconds. Labour was second on 6.44 seconds. Ukip was bottom of the table on nine seconds, more than a second adrift of the Green Party, who along with the Lib Dems and the Tories were all in the seven second range.

Michael Allen, vice president of solutions at Dynatrace, said: “This year’s general election is being fought on the digital battleground like no other before it.

“As voters try to decide on which way to go in the run-up to the election, they will be turning to the web to stay abreast of all the latest information on party mandates, politicians’ promises and those all-important election gaffes.”