Month: January 2021

An analysis by web firm Tangowork revealed that Integris has the fastest credit union website in BC — faster than all the big banks, too.

In a study of all 43 credit union websites in British Columbia, Tangowork found that Integris’ website loaded in 1.4 seconds — more than 11 times faster than the slowest website on the list, Lake View Credit Union.

“Slow websites frustrate people,” says Chris McGrath, president of Tangowork, a specialist in high-performance websites. “In contrast, a quick website delights users. They stay longer, visit more pages, and ultimately buy more.”

Performance data from credit union websites in British Columbia, Canada. See all data

Slow websites can be caused by a variety of factors:

• Large images. Osoyoos Credit Union uses large, poorly-processed images that swell their home page to 7MB — about 4 times the size it needs to be.
• Sloppy code. Sunshine Coast‘s website generates dozens of background warnings and errors and uses 65 JavaScript files, which require intensive processing by web browsers.
• Slow servers. Kootenay Savings Credit Union‘s performance went from a D during the business day to an A at night — indicative of a server that is under strain.
• Too much tracking software. Envision Financial loads 173 files onto visitors’ web browsers, including tracking code from Drawbridge, Facebook, Google, Hubspot, LinkedIn, and Pinterest.

Not ranked in the list were a surprising 17 credit union sites that are not mobile-friendly — either offering partial mobile support or none at all. Websites that don’t support mobile sometimes load faster, but at the expense of excluding an estimated 50% of visitors that are on their phones.

Integris has the highest-performing website of any credit union in British Columbia

Integris, the fastest site, follows performance best practices, including proper sizing of images, file compression, and well-structured code. (To make their website competitive with the fastest websites in the world, they could consider implementing it as a pre-rendered single-page app with link pre-fetching.)

Lake View was the slowest website of any credit union in British Columbia

Lake View, the slowest site, has a very slow initial response time, massive images that aren’t properly compressed, and long “request chains” that delay the loading of the page. At 15.8 seconds, Lake View’s website would be off-putting for all but the most patient of visitors.

Of the big banks, RBC offers the best example of a well-built site — fast, modern and feature-rich. In contrast, TD’s bloated site rates an “F” due to sloppy construction that downloads 304 files onto visitors’ web browsers.

To learn more about building a high-performance website, see Tangowork’s case study: “How you can grow your website traffic 51%—overnight—by radically increasing speed.“