HALF of Scottish councils failed to meet the threshold of good website performance, a much poorer rate than the UK average, according to a new study.

The fastest Scottish council was East Renfrewshire, with Sheffield Council coming out top overall with a website that opened 700 times faster than the worst performer, which was a London borough council.

Exactly half of the 32 Scots councils failed to meet the 'half second' limit

The team behind the survey, specialist IT monitors netEvidence, said it was "not in the business of naming and shaming" and would not identify Scotland's poorest performing council websites.

But it revealed the slowest Scottish council was 4553 seconds, over 62 times slower than East Renfrewshire which took only 0.073 seconds.

The worst performer, the unnamed London borough, took over 30 seconds on average to open, more than 700 times slower than Sheffield, whose site responded in an average of 0.04 seconds.