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Performance Tracking  > 2018 Holiday Season

WebSitePulse 2018 Holiday Retail Performance and Uptime Report Summary


Holiday season 2018 has ended and so is our 2018 Holiday Retail Performance and Uptime Report.

For 13th year in a row WebSitePulse has monitored the leading US online retailers measuring and evaluating their availability and speed during that busy time of the year. For the purpose of this Performance Report, WebSitePulse measured the performance of the websites’ home pages as well as a complete web transaction like an end user would interact with the website.

The report measures both Uptime and Response Time of the websites as well as measurements of the multi-step online transactions which were made every 15 minutes, simultaneously from 3 different monitoring locations: Washington DC (US East Coast), Los Angeles, CA (US West Coast) and Chicago, IL (US Central).

The overall uptime and speed of the monitored online retailers’ websites were good and without many fluctuations during the whole monitored period.

We have found out the daily average response time from all monitored websites was 3.9 sec. The daily average responses by locations are as follow:

This year’s winner for fastest loading website is lowes.com with an average response time of 1.549 seconds, followed by costco.com (1.763 sec) and target.com (1.942 sec). Far away at the bottom of the table was walmart.com with 8.170 seconds average response time which may have frustrated some potential customers and led to lower sales.

The daily average uptime for the entire group of 10 websites for 2018 holiday season was 99.87%. The daily average uptime by locations are as follow: The for this year’s holiday season is target.com with 99.998% uptime for the whole monitored period, closely followed by amazon.com (99.997%) and tigerdirect.com (99.993%). At the bottom of the availability chart stands lowes.com with 99.224% which mean it was not accessible for almost 8and a half hours during the whole monitored period.

The summarized numbers and averages for the entire monitoring period are shown in the tables below:

Average Response times for the whole period
#TargetLos AngelesChicagoWashingtonAvg. resp. time
1lowes.com2.1301.4001.1171.549
2costco.com1.8751.8301.5841.763
3target.com3.1811.2541.3911.942
4qvc.com2.4281.8991.7802.035
5tigerdirect.com2.8841.9753.8762.912
6cdw.com4.3763.3943.5063.759
7amazon.com4.2733.3227.3024.966
8officedepot.com6.5715.2455.2455.687
9hallmark.com7.5365.6245.4316.197
10walmart.com6.95411.5096.0458.170

Average Uptime for the whole period
#TargetLos AngelesChicagoWashingtonAvg. uptime
1cdw.com100.000%100.000%100.000%100.000%
2target.com100.000%100.000%99.995%99.998%
3amazon.com99.992%100.000%99.998%99.997%
4tigerdirect.com100.000%100.000%99.979%99.993%
5qvc.com99.943%100.000%100.000%99.981%
6walmart.com99.986%99.975%99.981%99.980%
7hallmark.com99.977%99.970%99.977%99.975%
8officedepot.com99.823%99.822%99.875%99.840%
9costco.com99.760%99.753%99.766%99.760%
10lowes.com99.082%99.282%99.308%99.224%

We wish you a Prosperous and Error-free New Year!

Best regards, and takeITeasy™ with WebSitePulse™

Iavor Marinoff, CEO


Methodology:
Performance and availability are measured for a typical travel-related booking web transaction at 15 minute monitoring interval, every day, 24/7. The WebSitePulse application monitoring service is used to collect data and to create the reports.
The steps in each transaction are comparable for all websites, and reflect the real online buyers' experience. The simultaneous monitoring is performed from three locations of the WebSitePulse global monitoring network. In case of a detected malfunction or unavailability, the system performs automated error verification from four independent resources and only after the above procedure is performed and has returned consistent results, the detected error is confirmed, recorded, and included in the daily performance reports. In these cases, an advanced WebSitePulse exclusive feature comes into play - Forced Monitoring -, which automatically switches to a 3 minute monitoring interval for increased accuracy.

About WebSitePulse:
WebSitePulse is a leading provider of global, independent, and objective availability and performance monitoring of web sites, servers, network components, web applications, e-business- and email round-trip transactions.

Contact:
For more information about this report please contact:
George T., CTO
phone: 1-407-380-1600
email:


Reproduction:
WebSitePulse launched the Performance and Uptime Reports program to keep the general public and the Internet community informed about the performance of specific websites and the challenges their webmasters, owners and operators are facing on a daily basis, especially when the web traffic intensifies due to some special events through the year. Some of the most popular web destinations, related to each particular event, are selected for the purpose of the Reports, and data from their performance measurements is made available on the WebSitePulse public website.

With the intention to broadly disseminate this information for the benefit of the Internet community, we encourage the use of this information without prior approval and under the following Terms and Conditions:

The Data from the performance measurements cannot be changed or manipulated and should be used "as is".