Cyber Monday 2021: The Fastest and Slowest Retail Websites

Cyber Monday marks the official last day of Cyber Five and is becoming an increasingly popular day for deals and steals. As the biggest day in eCommerce, last year sales hit $10.8 billion. Will records be broken again this year?

The results are in, and – drum roll – online spending totaled $10.7 billion according to an article from CNBC. With a 1.4% decrease compared to last year, it marks a slowdown in spending on Cyber Monday.

In general, we have observed that a 5-minute outage during Cyber Monday can cost major retailers over $1 million in revenue. Even just a 1-second site slowdown can cost a business between 6% and 13% of their total revenue.

So, how did leading retail websites perform during Cyber Monday? Check out our final installment below of the fastest and slowest retailers.

Methodology

This year we are focusing on two critical web performance indicators – Largest Contenful Paint (LCP), and secondarily, Time to Interactive.

Largest Contentful Paint is a Core Web Vital that measures the time a website takes to show the user the largest content on the screen, complete and ready for interaction. According to Google’s Core Web Vitals Team, an LCP of 2.5 seconds or faster is considered good. An LCP of 4.0 seconds or more is considered bad and needs improvement.

Read more how web vitals impact your online business.

Time to Interactive is the amount of time it takes for the web page to become fully interactive. This is a Google Lighthouse metric and is weighted heavily in Google’s Page Speed Score calculation.

The below report is based on Home Page measurements run by Blue Triangle's Synthetic Monitoring, taken from 5 US locations.

The 20 Fastest US Retail Websites

The 20 Fastest US Retail Websites by Largest Contentful Paint (LCP)

The 20 Slowest US Retail Websites

The 20 Slowest US Retail Websites by Largest Contentful Paint (LCP)

Most online retailers typically experience an increase in website traffic during Cyber Week. So, while these are the 20 slowest US retail websites by Largest Contentful Paint, they may perform differently at normal levels throughout the year.

Key Takeaways

• For the first time ever, spending online during Cyber Monday fell from the previous year ($10.8 billion compared to $10.9 billion in 2020)
• Slower sales growth on Cyber Monday may be attributed to fewer perceived deals, limited product choices, and retailers spreading out promotions earlier in the season to encourage holiday shopping

Interested in seeing how the top US retailers stack up weekly? Check out our Retail US Benchmarks.