Cyber 5 2021 Recap:

With the ongoing pressures of the pandemic and consumer sentiment, shipping delays, and supply chain issues, similar to 2020, retailers have pivoted to Cyber 5, also known as “Cyber Week”, being a marathon, not a sprint.

During Cyber 5, several prominent websites, such as Office Depot, Walmart, and GameStop, experienced performance issues, including outages and slow load times. As a result of these disruptions, it may lead to lost revenue and shoppers abandoning their carts. Compared to shopping in-store, it is much easier to close a browser tab and shop elsewhere.

We also observed how a popular product, such as the newest X Box Series X and Playstation 5, may break a site by flooding websites with traffic to those product landing pages. To read more about this phenomenon, check out “The Curse of Ye”.

Methodology

This year we are focusing on two critical web performance indicators – Largest Contenful Paint (LCP), and secondarily, Time to Interactive.

Largest Contentful Paint is a Core Web Vital that measures the time a website takes to show the user the largest content on the screen, complete and ready for interaction. According to Google’s Core Web Vitals Team, an LCP of 2.5 seconds or faster is considered good. An LCP of 4.0 seconds or more is considered bad and needs improvement.

Read more how web vitals impact your online business.

Time to Interactive is the amount of time it takes for the web page to become fully interactive. This is a Google Lighthouse metric and is weighted heavily in Google’s Page Speed Score calculation.

The below reports are based on Home Page measurements run by Blue Triangle's Synthetic Monitoring, taken from 5 US locations.

Thanksgiving 2021 Report: The Fastest and Slowest Retail Websites

Black Friday 2021 Report: The Fastest and Slowest Retail Websites

Cyber Monday 2021 Report: The Fastest and Slowest Retail Websites

Key Takeaways

• Online sales were flat on Thanksgiving Day compared to the previous year, and there was a decline on both Black Friday and Cyber Monday.
• This year saw a trend in which shoppers have spread out their dollars over more days as retailers introduced early deals outside of Cyber Week.

Interested in seeing how the top US retailers stack up weekly? Check out our Retail US Benchmarks.