RentVine - The Fastest Gun in Town

I got to thinking about speed and user experience when RentClicks recently changed their site this week and it started running slow. RentClicks since then is running faster back on the old design.

I thought it might be nice to show property managers which sites perform the fastest.

To run this test I cleared my browser’s cache and used a Firefox toolbar tool that shows me the “Complete Time to Download” and the “Page Size” stats.

I wanted to test it on a city page like Charlotte, but not all sites are designed the same way so to make it fair I picked a state page - North Carolina.

Here are the fastest sites:

1. RentVine - 0.6 seconds and 19.4KB
2. Rentals - 2.25 seconds and 134KB
3. HomeRentalAds - 2.5 seconds and 55KB
4. RentalHomesPlus - 2.8 seconds and 85KB
5. RentalHouses - 2.9 seconds and 69KB
6. RentClicks - 3.7 seconds and 57KB

Anytime I do a post like this where I do comparisons I usually get a response from my competitors saying how I didn’t do the testing correctly. I am sure I will hear from them on this one too - such as it depends on the time of day, the load on the server, which banner ads are loading and other issues.

For the most part if the page loads within 5 seconds everyone is pretty happy.  If it takes 10-20 seconds like what happened to RentClicks earlier this week, I gotta think users will have a poor user experience and seek out other sites that are more responsive.

So, if all the sites are under 5 seconds - what is the point of this post? Pretty simple, anytime I can create a list of rental sites where I am on the top - I am going to show it!