Our WebSitePulse 2026 Valentine’s Day Online Retail Performance and Uptime Report is completed. For the 19th year in a row, we monitored six leading gift-shopping websites during the St. Valentine’s Day shopping period.

For this Performance Report, WebSitePulse measured the performance of websites’ home pages and complete web transactions, such as an end-user interacting with the website. The report measures both the websites’ Uptime and Response Time and the multi-step online transactions, which were made every 15 minutes, simultaneously from three 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 very good during the monitored period. We found that all monitored websites’ average daily response time was 3.303 sec. The daily average response times by location are as follows:

• Washington DC (US East Coast) – 3.126 sec.
• San Francisco, CA (US West Coast) – 3.590 sec.
• Chicago, IL (US Central) – 3.193 sec.

This year’s speed leader is farmgirlflowers.com, with an average response time of 1.346 sec., followed by brookstone.com (2.515 sec.) and gourmetgiftbaskets.com (2.935 sec.). Close behind was harryanddavid.com, with an average response time of 3.307 sec. At the lower end of the performance scale was vermonteddybear.com, with an average response time of 3.598 sec., while helzberg.com showed the slowest performance overall, with an average response time of 6.118 sec., which may have tested the patience of online shoppers.

The overall uptime of the monitored online retailers’ websites was nearly uninterrupted during the monitored period, with only minor and isolated availability fluctuations.

The daily average uptime for the six websites during the 2026 Valentine’s Day monitoring period was 99.98%. The daily average uptime by location is as follows:

• Washington DC (US East Coast) – 99.98%
• San Francisco, CA (US West Coast) – 99.96%
• Chicago, IL (US Central) – 99.99%

Most monitored websites maintained excellent availability throughout the monitored period, with several achieving continuous uptime close to or equal to 100%. Only minor, short-duration interruptions were observed, and no major outages or prolonged downtime incidents were detected.

Average Response times for the whole period

#	Target	San Francisco	Chicago	Washington	Avg. resp. time
1	farmgirlflowers.com	1.704	1.307	1.028	1.346
2	brookstone.com	2.595	2.556	2.393	2.515
3	gourmetgiftbaskets.com	3.369	2.884	2.552	2.935
4	harryanddavid.com	3.745	2.642	3.535	3.307
5	vermonteddybear.com	3.763	3.656	3.374	3.598
6	helzberg.com	6.364	6.112	5.877	6.118

Average Uptime for the whole period

#	Target	San Francisco	Chicago	Washington	Avg. uptime
1	helzberg.com	100.000%	100.000%	100.000%	100.000%
2	harryanddavid.com	100.000%	100.000%	100.000%	100.000%
3	farmgirlflowers.com	100.000%	100.000%	100.000%	100.000%
4	gourmetgiftbaskets.com	100.000%	99.951%	100.000%	99.984%
5	brookstone.com	99.959%	100.000%	99.963%	99.974%
6	vermonteddybear.com	99.941%	99.975%	99.961%	99.959%