Vancouver's StrangeLoop Analyzes Performance of U.S. Presidency Candidates' Websites

These days, to get votes, politicians need to have effective digital presences. Television smear campaigns and kissing babies at public photo-ops don't cut it anymore—you need to have a website, at the very least, and it needs to be good.

Knowing this, Vancouver-based Strangeloop decided to take a peek at Barack Obama and his Republican competition to see how their websites and mobile strategies stack up. And some of the findings are certainly interesting.

One finding was that faster load times for websites correlated impressively well with voting—faster websites, in general, equalled more votes. Rick Santorum and Ron Paul, with websites taking over 10 seconds to load, fell far behind in the race to New Gingrich and Mitt Romney, who handily dominate.

But on the mobile front, everyone got a failing grade. According to Strangeloop president Joshua Bixby, "none of the candidates’ sites rose to the challenge of designing for mobile devices." He says that mobile website performance on a 3G Android device "ranged from slow to unbearable," with some full sites taking multiple minutes to load. (All sites performed better on an iPhone, naturally.)

You can see the full analysis from Strangeloop here.