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Performance Tracking  > 2023 Valentine's Day

WebSitePulse 2023 Valentine's Day Online Retail Performance and Uptime Report Summary


St. Valentine's Day 2023 has passed, and so has the period of largest spending since the winter holidays. Americans were predicted to spend $25.9 billion for this holiday alone. Most money was spent on candy (57%), greeting cards (40%), flowers (37%), an evening out (32%), jewelry (21%), gift cards (20%), and clothing (19%).

According to NRF, 35% of the gift shipping was predicted to be made online, which is why online retailers had to be prepared for the heavier traffic.

For the 16th year in a raw WebSitePulse monitored six leading gift shopping websites during the St. Valentine's Day fever and compiled the WebSitePulse 2023 Valentine's Day Online Retail Performance and Uptime Report.

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 the 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), San Francisco, CA (US West Coast) and Chicago, IL (US Central).

The overall speed of the monitored online retailers' websites was quite good during the whole monitored period. We found that all monitored websites' average daily response time was 3.151 sec. which is 0.193 sec faster than last year's. The daily average responses by location are as follows:
  • Washington DC (US East Coast) – 2.963 sec
  • San Francisco, CA (US West Coast) – 3.606 sec
  • Chicago, IL (US Central) – 2.944 sec
For a second time in a row, harryanddavid.com was the speed leader among the six monitored gift shopping websites with an average response time of 2.156 seconds, followed by helzberg.com (2.344 sec) and vermonteddybear.com (2.643 sec). Far away at the bottom of the table was ftd.com, with 4.208 seconds average response time, which is 0.365 sec. faster than last year's Valentine's Day Report's slowest website. However, the delay undoubtedly frustrated many of its visitors and led to a revenue loss.

The overall uptime of the monitored online retailers' websites was nearly uninterrupted during the whole monitored period except for homesick.com, which was down for almost an hour on the 8th, and vermonteddybear.com, which was down more than 5 hours on the 15th ( the last monitored date).

The daily average uptime for the six websites for 2023 St. Valentine's Day was 99.68%. The daily average uptime by location is as follows:
  • Washington DC (US East Coast) – 99.68%
  • San Francisco, CA (US West Coast) – 99.67%
  • Chicago, IL (US Central) – 99.67%
This year, just harryanddavid.com was 100% online for the whole monitored period. Almost without interruptions were brookstone.com (99.995%) and ftd.com (99.990%). Vermonteddybear.com was the site with the highest downtime — 98.362%- meaning it was down for nearly 6 hours during the whole monitoring period.

Average Response times for the whole period
#TargetSan FranciscoChicagoWashingtonAvg. resp. time
1harryanddavid.com2.7511.9051.8112.156
2helzberg.com3.1092.0701.8532.344
3vermonteddybear.com2.2542.6762.9992.643
4brookstone.com4.0323.4823.6203.711
5homesick.com4.3153.6593.5543.843
6ftd.com5.2013.8843.5394.208

Average Uptime for the whole period
#TargetSan FranciscoChicagoWashingtonAvg. uptime
1harryanddavid.com100.000%100.000%100.000%100.000%
2brookstone.com100.000%99.985%100.000%99.995%
3ftd.com99.970%100.000%100.000%99.990%
4helzberg.com99.955%99.982%100.000%99.979%
5homesick.com99.746%99.707%99.731%99.728%
6vermonteddybear.com98.367%98.339%98.381%98.362%