The Yottaa team is happy to announce Yottaa Speed Bracket.  For every matchup in the big dance, check out our bracket page to see the head-to-head web performance Yottaa Scores for those pages.  Even if your alma mater’s basketball team ends up losing on the court, perhaps you will find a source of pride in its next most important team: the Web Team!

Here’s the idea: every school has an athletics website, but these sites are not created equally.  We measured each of the 64 team sites using our Yottaa Score, a web performance metric that measures the time it takes for a web page to load at four distinct stages of the loading process from locations around the world.  We found that the schools’ sites vary widely in performance, from Yottaa scores in the 90s (blazing fast) and below 10 (dreadfully slow).  With this in mind, we wanted to see what the matchups in website speed look like compared with the real-life basketball matchups.

Busy Sites – Varying Performance

Athletics websites are typically chaotic, colorful affairs, with lots of features.  Images, Flash, embedded video, and other plugins are all crammed onto their home pages.  But this is not necessarily a death knell for performance.  For example, Temple University and Vanderbilt have websites that look much like any other but are brilliant performers with high Yottaa Scores.  Compare these sites with those of
The University of Michigan or UNLV: these sites look similar to the other two, but they perform poorly, with Yottaa Scores of 3 and 4.

A glance at the data will reveal that these lower-scoring pages are much more complex, with many more assets and much “heavier” overall weight.  The best sites on this benchmark are less than 500 kilobytes, whereas the worst is over 3 megabytes.  That’s a big difference.  And since the sites all look similar, that means it all comes down to optimization – that is, what the web teams are doing to combine and compress those big assets and require as few trips as possible.

Why all the Fuss about Performance?

Website speed matters, even for basketball teams.  Fans looking for the latest on their favorite team will be dismayed to find a slow website, and will probably divert to one of the many other sports portals online.  That’s not good for the school’s image.  The athletics websites of large schools like the ones that typically field NCAA tournament teams are just as important as the websites of any large business.  The basketball teams are often huge revenue and PR generators for the schools, and they deserve websites that can serve those purposes well.

Plus the websites are also potentially revenue streams themselves. Whether it 3^rd party advertising, such as Michigan‘s huge Old Spice ad, or promotions for other school-sponsored athletic events and games, the question is: why send quality traffic to portals like ESPN or CBS when you could keep it at home?

Be Sure to Check In!

Click here to see the Yottaa Speed Bracket and be sure to check back as the tournament progresses! Tweet your predictions for the Yottaa scores of this year’s champion with the hashtag #speedbracket.