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Cyber Monday 2019: The Fastest and Slowest Retail Websites

Web Performance

 

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Spending on Cyber Monday increased 19.7% from last year - totaling a whopping $9.4B. Our retail customer traffic increased 66% between Sunday 12/1 and Cyber Monday, but was 21% less than Black Friday. Notice the spike in traffic towards the end of Cyber Monday.

Cyber 5 Traffic-1

Blue Triangle retail customer traffic: Cyber Five days (11/28 – 12/2)

With the influx of traffic throughout the Cyber Five (Thanksgiving - Cyber Monday), major retailers were faced with slowdowns and outages. Luxury retailer Saks Fifth Avenue extended their Cyber Monday sale through Tuesday after the Saks.com site experienced issues late Monday night.

Average page load time increased 38% between Thanksgiving and Cyber Monday across the Digital Commerce Top 500 sites.

We've found that even a 5-minute outage during Cyber Monday can cost major retailers over $1 million in revenue, and a 1-second slowdown can cost a firm between 6% and 13% of their total revenue.

Methodology

This year we are focusing on 2 critical web performance metrics - Time to Interactive and Page Load time. These metrics are highly correlated with buying behavior.

Time to Interactive
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 PageSpeed Score (v5) calculation.

Page Load Time
The amount of time required for the server to load the page completely, including content, images, JavaScript, CSS, and other external files.

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

Leading Retailers

Time to Interactive (sec)

top 20 time to interactive-1

Page Load Time (sec)

top 20 page load time-4

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The Fastest Digital Commerce 360 Top 500 Retailers 

Time to Interactive (sec)

top 500 time to interactive

Page Load Time (sec)

top 500 page load time

The Slowest Digital Commerce 360 Top 500 Retailers

Time to Interactive (sec)

top 500 time to interactive slowest

Page Load Time (sec)

top 500 page load time slowest

 

Key takeaways

  • Blue Triangle’s retail customer traffic increased 66% between Sunday 12/1 and Cyber Monday, but was 21% less than Black Friday. 
  • The Internet Retailer Top 500 websites slowed down 38%, on average between Thanksgiving Day and Cyber Monday.
  • Saks Fifth Avenue was the only retailer with site availability issues on Cyber Monday. They were forced to extend their sale through Tuesday.

See where the top US retailers stack up weekly: Access the Retail US Benchmarks

Have any questions or comments? Send me an email: josh@bluetriangle.com

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<< Thanksgiving Day report

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