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Performance Tracking  > 2021 Holiday Season

WebSitePulse 2021 Holiday Retail Performance and Uptime Report Summary


Although 2021 was still under the influence of the COVID-19 pandemic and its restrictions, it was a successful year for e-commerce websites. Due to the Coronavirus, most holiday purchases were made online, putting pressure on servers behind the holiday shopping websites. Now that the Holiday season 2021 has ended, and so has our 2021 Holiday Retail Performance and Uptime Report.

For the 15 th 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 this Performance Report, WebSitePulse measured the performance of the websites' home pages and 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 monitored online retailers' websites' overall speed was good, except for a few fluctuations during the whole monitored period.

We found that the daily average response time from all monitored websites was 2.947 sec, 0.179 seconds faster than last year. The daily average responses by locations are as follow: This year's winner for the fastest loading website is barnesandnoble.com, with an average response time of 1.471 seconds, followed by eddiebauer.com (1.787 sec) and michaels.com (2.297 sec). Far away at the bottom of the table again was amazon.com with a 5.401 seconds average response time, which may have frustrated some potential customers and led to lower sales.

The overall uptime of the monitored online retailers' websites was satisfactory during the whole monitored period except for costco.com and officedepot.com, which had some minor downtime during the monitored time. For more information, check the report highlights.

The daily average uptime for the entire group of 10 websites for the 2021 holiday season was 99.84%. The daily average uptime by location are as follow: The winner for this year's holiday season is cdw.com, with 100% uptime for the whole monitored period, closely followed by amazon.com (99.997%) and barnesandnoble.com (99.995%). At the bottom of the availability chart stands eddiebauer.com with 99.414%, which means it was not accessible for nearly 7 hours during the whole monitored period.

Average Response times for the whole period
#TargetLos AngelesChicagoWashingtonAvg. resp. time
1barnesandnoble.com1.6001.3401.4741.471
2eddiebauer.com1.9371.7931.6311.787
3michaels.com2.4502.1822.2592.297
4samsclub.com2.2542.5782.4612.431
5belk.com2.5692.5582.8742.667
6costco.com2.8702.7513.0102.877
7cdw.com3.5072.9743.2583.246
8hallmark.com2.8243.0344.0393.299
9officedepot.com4.0673.8734.0513.997
10amazon.com5.9515.2784.9755.401

Average Uptime for the whole period
#TargetLos AngelesChicagoWashingtonAvg. uptime
1cdw.com100.000%100.000%100.000%100.000%
2amazon.com99.994%100.000%99.997%99.997%
3barnesandnoble.com99.994%99.992%99.998%99.995%
4michaels.com99.948%99.941%99.952%99.947%
5hallmark.com99.908%99.925%99.928%99.920%
6samsclub.com99.797%99.956%99.951%99.901%
7belk.com99.808%99.810%99.818%99.812%
8costco.com99.806%99.807%99.815%99.810%
9officedepot.com99.495%99.648%99.689%99.611%
10eddiebauer.com99.414%99.389%99.438%99.414%

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".