In the ever-evolving landscape of e-commerce, the performance and reliability of online retail platforms are more critical than ever, especially during high-traffic events like Valentine's Day. As consumers flock to the web to find the perfect gifts for their loved ones, the pressure on online retailers to deliver seamless, uninterrupted service intensifies.

According to a Trustpilot study, many Americans felt they needed to spend a lot on Valentine's Day. Across all ages, 21% of those in relationships felt they must pay more than they can afford, and 19% think their partner expects them to spend a lot. Because of the increased living costs, 30% of Americans in relationships skipped Valentine's Day, which was too costly. For those celebrating, the average expected spending on a Valentine's gift is about $157.52, the survey says.

Our WebSitePulse 2024 Valentine's Day Online Retail Performance and Uptime Report is completed now that St. Valentine's Day is behind us. For the 17th year in a row, we monitored six leading gift-shopping websites during the St. Valentine's Day fever.

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 the average daily response time of all monitored websites was 2.871 sec. which is 0.280 sec faster than last year's. The daily average responses by location are as follows:

• Washington DC (US East Coast) – 2.644 sec
• San Francisco, CA (US West Coast) – 3.253 sec
• Chicago, IL (US Central) – 2.717 sec

For the third time in a row, harryanddavid.com was the speed leader among the six monitored gift shopping websites, with an average response time of 2.309 seconds, followed by brookstone.com (2.670 sec) and helzberg.com (2.796 sec). Far away at the bottom of the table was, once again, ftd.com with a 3.552 average response time, which is 0.656 sec. faster than last year. 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 ftd.com, which was down for more than 6 hours altogether on the 6th, and vermonteddybear.com, which was down more than 8 hours altogether on the 9th.

The daily average uptime for the six websites for 2024 St. Valentine's Day was 99.25%. The daily average uptime by location is as follows:

• Washington DC (US East Coast) – 99.26%
• San Francisco, CA (US West Coast) – 99.24%
• Chicago, IL (US Central) – 99.24%

This year, just harryanddavid.com was 100% online for the whole monitored period for the second time in a row. Helzberg.com and homesick.com were almost without interruptions, both with 99.995% uptime. Vermonteddybear.com, again, had the highest downtime — 97.286%- meaning it was nonfunctional for nearly 10 hours during the monitoring period.

Average Response times for the whole period

#	Target	San Francisco	Chicago	Washington	Avg. resp. time
1	harryanddavid.com	2.952	2.125	1.852	2.309
2	brookstone.com	3.137	2.370	2.504	2.670
3	helzberg.com	3.705	2.510	2.173	2.796
4	vermonteddybear.com	2.380	2.894	3.258	2.844
5	homesick.com	3.388	2.795	2.985	3.056
6	ftd.com	3.954	3.609	3.092	3.552

Average Uptime for the whole period

#	Target	San Francisco	Chicago	Washington	Avg. uptime
1	harryanddavid.com	100.000%	100.000%	100.000%	100.000%
2	helzberg.com	100.000%	100.000%	99.986%	99.995%
3	homesick.com	100.000%	100.000%	99.985%	99.995%
4	brookstone.com	100.000%	99.983%	100.000%	99.994%
5	ftd.com	98.257%	98.200%	98.237%	98.231%
6	vermonteddybear.com	97.257%	97.276%	97.325%	97.286%