rom time to time, we like to run audits on major company websites to illustrate three things: 1) Remind you that these evaluation tools exist and are a great quick, cheap way to get suggestions on improving your website, 2) Show you that massive companies and teams of web engineers can get things wrong, and by extension, 3) Make you feel better about whatever shortcomings your own site has; if these huge companies are missing the mark, then don't kick yourself for your own site not getting a perfect score of 100.


Evaluation Tool

There are plenty of great free website evaluators out there, many from Google. For the purposes of this article, we're going with Hubspot's "Website Grader" - feel free to try it. The results are broken down into areas to focus on.

This one is a great snapshot for our purposes in this article. I will say that several others like Google's various tools or Semrush, etc. will give you a punchlist of specific items to fix in their report.


The Ratings

Again, there are scores in subsections of these 4 areas (example: https://website.grader.com/tests/amazon.com) but for our purposes we get 4 high-level scores in these reports:
- Performance (30) - Page size, number of page requests, loading speed, et al.
- SEO (30) - Meta description, index-ability, reliance on content plugins
- Mobile (30) - Responsiveness, font size, visibility of tap targets.
- Security (10) - HTTPS security, exploitability of Javascript libraries.


The Sites - eCommerce

For this survey, we're going to the biggies: the Top 10 U.S. eCommerce sites. I've always said that you can't afford to have poor site performance give your (potential) customers ANY opportunity or motivation to leave your page. The same is true pretty much for every company - although I would imagine people would be more willing to deal with page lag from Amazon or eBay than from a lesser, no-name site.

The Top 10:
1 - Amazon
2 - eBay
3 - Walmart
4 - Etsy
5 - Target
6 - Home Depot
7 - Craiglist
8 - Costco
NOTE: Best Buy and Wayfair really are two of the top 10 ecommerce companies, but they have elements on their sites preventing this audit, which in itself is unusual.


Ratings

Amazon.com
TOTAL: 81
Performance: 11, SEO: 30, Mobile: 30, Security: 10
Our Observations: With all of the software manpower in their braintrust, a poor score would be pretty shocking. But when your page does as many things on it (or loads as many objects) as Amazon is doing, yes the page loading speed will suffer - and you can be it was a calculated decision on their part for functionality vs. speed.

eBay
TOTAL: 72
Performance: 12, SEO: 30, Mobile: 20, Security: 10
Our Observations: The low score for mobile is disappointing. If you look at it on your phone, it doesn't look too bad - but they're getting dinged for how difficult it is to tap everything that should be an obvious button.

Walmart
TOTAL: 85
Performance: 15, SEO: 30, Mobile: 30, Security: 10
Our Observations: Just as with Amazon, they've just got so many widgets, plugins and trackers on their site, it really does slow down the page loading.

Etsy
TOTAL: 72
Performance: 12, SEO: 30, Mobile: 20, Security: 10
Our Observations: One of two sites on this list I've never personally used. Same issues as the ones above, but the 15 second time until full page load is pretty rotten.

Target
TOTAL: 68
Performance: 8, SEO: 30, Mobile: 20, Security: 10
Our Observations: Same at Etsy, but even slower for loading through the test. To be fair, they both disguise the loading very well - while the bottom of the page is still loading, the visible upper area appears pretty immediately, so it doesn't seem like it's still loading.

Home Depot
TOTAL: 64
Performance: 9, SEO: 25, Mobile: 20, Security: 10
Our Observations: We are grading on a tough curve here. Load their home page on your phone and scroll down quickly, it takes a little while compared to some of the other big boys.

Craiglist
TOTAL: 83
Performance: 18, SEO: 30, Mobile: 30, Security: 5
Our Observations: An odd poor score on Javascript security, but other than that these are some of the best scores around. I've always said that Craigslist's and Wikipedia's "light-weight" PHP design (in a good way) makes for terrific performance.

Costco
TOTAL: 56
Performance: 6, SEO: 30, Mobile: 10, Security: 10
Our Observations: Page loading times here are again a little misleading because they do a good job of loading in sequence. That said, this one just doesn't plan look good on a phone.

Apple
TOTAL: 64
Performance: 9, SEO: 25, Mobile: 20, Security: 10
Our Observations: Although Costco's rating is lower, I think Apple's performance here is the biggest fail. The Apple site is far less busy yet just as poor in loading speed. And for a major company to have poor marks in SEO descriptive link text is a silly unforced error.

Kroger
TOTAL: 68
Performance: 13, SEO: 25, Mobile: 20, Security: 10
Our Observations: Their errors really aren't that bad. Still, the have some slight misses in several best-practice areas.


The Takeaway

Out of these hugely influential and largest traffic sites, all of them have huge development and support staffs - and while none of these websites are noticeably poor, none of them are perfect for these acceptable metrics.
You should always strive for your site to be as good as possible. But if your site rates between 45 and 65 with this evaluation tool, don't feel too bad. Just try to do better next month.