A Comparative Study of German and Japanese University Homepages

In the globalization era, a university’s homepage on the Internet has become more critical since it can give an insight into the technologies valued by the university. In this research, we compared the university homepages/websites in Germany and Japan. We aimed to learn about the differences between these countries’ university websites. We first compiled a list of 492 German and 716 Japanese university websites. We then conducted experiments where users from two countries accessed all the websites. We gathered and analyzed the performance metrics related to technical and loading speed-related data for comparison. The results show that Japanese websites perform better regarding returned HTTP error codes, fewer redirects, and smaller download sizes. Regarding the loading speed, we observed that the Japanese websites could be accessed faster on average, locally and from overseas, than their German counterparts.