A new study has found that although demand for the ability to order groceries via safe shopping online has skyrocketed in recent weeks, some supermarket brands have not done enough to optimise their websites.

Researchers at SEOTesting.com revealed that Morrisons was the retailer with the slowest average page load speed, with the top five also including Sainsbury’s, Asda and Iceland.

At the other end of the scale was Amazon, which managed to lead the way with the shortest load times for its Fresh grocery delivery service. This is unsurprising given that it also owns extensive hosting infrastructure and has decades of experience making slick, speedy e-commerce sites.

Ocado managed to come in second place in terms of site performance, once again proving that pure-play online retailers are better equipped to impress customers with rapid loading times. Also mentioned amongst the faster grocery delivery sites was the Co-op’s own online outlet.

It is not just customer loyalty which determines the retailers that consumers choose to use to order groceries online: visibility on search engines like Google also has a huge influence over success in this sector. The study looked at which sites achieve the highest search rank for the search phrase ‘online grocery delivery’, with Waitrose managing to pip its rivals to the post in this respect.

Other brands which appeared to rank highly for this phrase include Ocado, Iceland and recipe meal kit delivery service Hello Fresh.

Search engine optimisation is important for all websites, and ultimately it is about ensuring that the customer experience is as good as possible, since sites can only achieve high ranks if they are able to perform quickly, provide relevant information to users and offer intuitive interfaces. Hopefully, the retailers singled out in this study will do more to replicate their better-optimised rivals.