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Performance Tracking  > 2021 Holiday Season  > Introduction

WebSitePulse 2021 Holiday Retail Performance and Uptime Report Intro


Regardless of the global Covid-19 pandemic, we long for the most important family holidays of the year. The Holiday season usually starts on the last Friday of November.

Black Friday is known for the enormous discounts most retailers offer, followed by Cyber Monday when we get deals from e-commerce sales.

Christmas is the most celebrated family holiday of the year, and it is when people usually spend a larger amount of money on presents, gifts, and celebratory meals.

The Holiday season usually ends shortly after New Year's Eve, in early January.

NRF predicts November and December 2021 sales will grow between 8.5% and 10.5% over 2020 to $843.4 — $859 billion. Black Friday (and Thanksgiving) sales alone are predicted to be $17 billion ($2.7 billion more than 2020). Cyber Monday 2021 sales are expected to be $11.8 billion ($1 billion more than 2020) by blackfriday.com

Since the Coronavirus pandemic restricts in some ways most of the brick-and-mortar stores, 85% of consumers plan to shop online, and 74% plan to shop both online and in stores, according to NPD Group.

Expecting a higher than usual demand and heavier traffic, online retailers need to keep a close eye on their web stores, servers, and fluent web transactions to meet online shoppers' growing needs.

For the 16th year in a row, WebSitePulse will monitor 12 of the most popular shopping websites. The 2021 Holiday Retail Performance and Uptime Report measures the websites' uptime and response time as the most critical metrics for any website's availability and reliability.

WebSitePulse will simultaneously make measurements of web transactions every 15 minutes from 3 different monitoring locations. In-depth analytical information is also collected and stored in the WebSitePulse system for future references.