Web performance scale

What does a high performance website look like? And how can we measure its performance? The present research develops and validates a new scale that measures Web performance as perceived by consumers. This scale discerns the formation of Web performance into the hedonic and utilitarian aspects reflecting Web users’ entertainment and information needs. Content domains for the two aspects were developed based on marketing and information systems literatures, and then tested for reliability and validity in two studies involving a total of 912 Web users. The measure was purified through exploratory and confirmatory factor analyses and MTMM models, resulting in one three-item scale for hedonic (reliability = 0.867) and one four-item scale for utilitarian (reliability = 0.850) Web performance. The scale thus developed not only has face validity, but also displays adequate construct reliability, convergent validity, discriminant validity, and nomological validity. It achieved reliability and validity using only seven items for the two aspects of Web performance making it highly feasible for implementation and particularly appealing to Web managers for tracking and improving site performance.