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Performance Tracking > 2025 Holiday Season
The 2025 holiday shopping season, covering the period from Thanksgiving through early January, showed strong overall stability across all monitored retail websites. Performance throughout the season remained resilient despite elevated traffic levels, with most targets maintaining high availability and predictable response times during peak shopping days such as Black Friday and Cyber Monday. Compared to typical pre-holiday baselines, the observed increases in response times were expected and generally well controlled.
Across Los Angeles, Chicago, and Washington monitoring locations, uptime performance was consistently strong throughout the period. Most monitored sites achieved near-perfect availability on the vast majority of days, demonstrating reliable infrastructure and effective capacity planning. Only a small number of isolated availability issues were observed, and these were limited to individual targets rather than systemic failures. The most notable disruption occurred on November 30, when OfficeDepot experienced a partial outage across all locations, resulting in reduced uptime for that day. Outside of this incident, availability levels quickly returned to normal and remained stable for the remainder of the season.
Response time behavior followed typical holiday traffic patterns. During peak demand periods, particularly around Black Friday and Cyber Monday, response times increased modestly but remained within acceptable operational thresholds. Larger, high-traffic retail platforms such as OfficeDepot, PC Richard, and Hallmark consistently recorded higher response times across all locations, reflecting increased load and more complex page structures. In contrast, smaller and direct-to-consumer brands including CozyEarth, MaterialKitchen, and Quince continued to deliver faster performance, often maintaining average response times below two seconds even during high-traffic days.
Regional monitoring results remained consistent throughout the season. Los Angeles generally showed slightly higher average response times for larger retail sites, while Chicago and Washington tended to deliver marginally faster results. These differences were consistent across the monitoring window and did not indicate any regional instability or network degradation.
Black Friday itself was handled smoothly across all locations. On November 28, uptime remained strong for nearly all monitored targets, and response times, while elevated compared to non-holiday periods, stayed within predictable ranges. No major outages were observed on Black Friday, indicating that most retailers were well prepared for peak traffic volumes. This stability carried into Cyber Monday, where uptime normalized and performance metrics closely mirrored post-Black Friday behavior.
As the season progressed into December, performance remained steady through the pre-Christmas shopping rush. A few isolated availability dips were observed for individual sites later in the month, including brief disruptions affecting MaterialKitchen and Hallmark, but these incidents were short-lived and did not impact overall seasonal trends. Christmas Day and the final days of December showed stable availability and response times, with metrics gradually returning toward baseline levels as traffic volumes declined.
Average Performance by Monitoring Location
WebSitePulse 2025 Holiday Retail Performance and Uptime Report Summary
The 2025 holiday shopping season, covering the period from Thanksgiving through early January, showed strong overall stability across all monitored retail websites. Performance throughout the season remained resilient despite elevated traffic levels, with most targets maintaining high availability and predictable response times during peak shopping days such as Black Friday and Cyber Monday. Compared to typical pre-holiday baselines, the observed increases in response times were expected and generally well controlled.
Across Los Angeles, Chicago, and Washington monitoring locations, uptime performance was consistently strong throughout the period. Most monitored sites achieved near-perfect availability on the vast majority of days, demonstrating reliable infrastructure and effective capacity planning. Only a small number of isolated availability issues were observed, and these were limited to individual targets rather than systemic failures. The most notable disruption occurred on November 30, when OfficeDepot experienced a partial outage across all locations, resulting in reduced uptime for that day. Outside of this incident, availability levels quickly returned to normal and remained stable for the remainder of the season.
Response time behavior followed typical holiday traffic patterns. During peak demand periods, particularly around Black Friday and Cyber Monday, response times increased modestly but remained within acceptable operational thresholds. Larger, high-traffic retail platforms such as OfficeDepot, PC Richard, and Hallmark consistently recorded higher response times across all locations, reflecting increased load and more complex page structures. In contrast, smaller and direct-to-consumer brands including CozyEarth, MaterialKitchen, and Quince continued to deliver faster performance, often maintaining average response times below two seconds even during high-traffic days.
Regional monitoring results remained consistent throughout the season. Los Angeles generally showed slightly higher average response times for larger retail sites, while Chicago and Washington tended to deliver marginally faster results. These differences were consistent across the monitoring window and did not indicate any regional instability or network degradation.
Black Friday itself was handled smoothly across all locations. On November 28, uptime remained strong for nearly all monitored targets, and response times, while elevated compared to non-holiday periods, stayed within predictable ranges. No major outages were observed on Black Friday, indicating that most retailers were well prepared for peak traffic volumes. This stability carried into Cyber Monday, where uptime normalized and performance metrics closely mirrored post-Black Friday behavior.
As the season progressed into December, performance remained steady through the pre-Christmas shopping rush. A few isolated availability dips were observed for individual sites later in the month, including brief disruptions affecting MaterialKitchen and Hallmark, but these incidents were short-lived and did not impact overall seasonal trends. Christmas Day and the final days of December showed stable availability and response times, with metrics gradually returning toward baseline levels as traffic volumes declined.
Average Performance by Monitoring Location
- Los Angeles: Average uptime remained at approximately 99.9%, with an average response time of around 3.9 seconds across all monitored targets.
- Chicago: Average uptime was approximately 99.9%, while average response times were slightly lower, at around 3.5 seconds.
- Washington: Average uptime was also close to 99.9%, with the fastest overall response times observed during the season, averaging approximately 3.4 seconds.
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Overall, the 2025 holiday season demonstrated a high degree of operational resilience across the monitored retail landscape. Despite sustained periods of elevated demand, most sites maintained excellent availability and predictable performance behavior. The limited number of isolated disruptions did not coincide with the most critical shopping days and were quickly resolved. Taken as a whole, the data reflects a well-prepared retail environment capable of delivering reliable online experiences throughout the busiest shopping period of the year.
Average Response times for the whole period
| # | Target | Los Angeles | Chicago | Washington | Avg. resp. time |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | cozyearth.com | 1.365 | 1.343 | 1.175 | 1.294 |
| 2 | materialkitchen.com | 1.324 | 1.678 | 1.497 | 1.500 |
| 3 | michaels.com | 1.828 | 1.654 | 1.587 | 1.690 |
| 4 | quince.com | 1.799 | 2.093 | 2.178 | 2.023 |
| 5 | ruralking.com | 2.843 | 1.990 | 1.793 | 2.209 |
| 6 | gobros.com | 3.612 | 3.853 | 3.773 | 3.746 |
| 7 | cdw.com | 4.331 | 3.646 | 3.760 | 3.913 |
| 8 | hallmark.com | 5.275 | 3.033 | 3.562 | 3.957 |
| 9 | officedepot.com | 5.609 | 4.578 | 5.050 | 5.079 |
| 10 | pcrichard.com | 6.332 | 6.663 | 5.783 | 6.259 |
Average Uptime for the whole period
| # | Target | Los Angeles | Chicago | Washington | Avg. uptime |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | gobros.com | 100.000% | 100.000% | 100.000% | 100.000% |
| 2 | cozyearth.com | 100.000% | 100.000% | 100.000% | 100.000% |
| 3 | ruralking.com | 100.000% | 100.000% | 100.000% | 100.000% |
| 4 | quince.com | 100.000% | 100.000% | 100.000% | 100.000% |
| 5 | michaels.com | 100.000% | 100.000% | 100.000% | 100.000% |
| 6 | pcrichard.com | 100.000% | 100.000% | 100.000% | 100.000% |
| 7 | cdw.com | 99.993% | 99.999% | 99.997% | 99.996% |
| 8 | hallmark.com | 99.814% | 99.827% | 99.813% | 99.818% |
| 9 | officedepot.com | 99.598% | 99.609% | 99.604% | 99.603% |
| 10 | materialkitchen.com | 99.378% | 98.983% | 99.381% | 99.247% |
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".
