Cyber Monday 2023: The Fastest and Slowest Retail Websites

Cyber Monday has proven itself to be the biggest shopping day this holiday season (and year) ringing in a record-setting $12.4 billion in online sales, up 9.6% from last year and surpassing initial expectations.

And that’s not the only record that was set.

Price-pinched shoppers have taken advantage of BNPL this Cyber Monday with $940 million worth of purchases, surging 42.5% from last year.

In total, Cyber Week 2023 (the five days from Thanksgiving Day through Cyber Monday, including Black Friday) pulled in $38 billion in online sales alone.

Holiday shoppers stretched their budgets this holiday shopping season.

Consumers were on the hunt for bargains and used Buy Now Pay Later (BNPL) services, allowing consumers to defer payment and pay off purchases over time in interest-free installments.

With so many consumers relying on BNPL, it’s become important site functionality for retailers and eCommerce brands.

Like most website content nowadays, this is accomplished by adding JavaScript to a site, for example, tags to dynamically display BNPL payment method messaging and payment options to product, cart, and payment pages.

However, tags can drastically affect how pages load and can create friction impacting the customer experience and even costing revenue.

1. For one major retail company, for example, we closely watched Cyber Monday traffic coming to the website and how performance (i.e., Onload and Largest Contentful Paint) impacted revenue.

2. Looking deeper, we observed friction on product detail pages and the checkout page, which, you guessed it, contains tags for BNPL services.

3. The culprit was confirmed by utilizing our unique Function Tracing and Aggregate Waterfalls to reveal long-running JavaScript costing revenue and creating friction in the user experience, and leveraged to deploy the perfect fix.

On the Cyber Monday episode of The Frictionless Experience, Mike Lively, Senior Vice President of Engineering at Slickdeals, and co-host Nick Paladino have an insightful conversation on ways to prevent third-party tags (like the one in the example above) from causing costly performance issues and customer friction to ensure reliable user experiences.

So, considering that long-running JavaScript can often be the source of friction, let’s take a look at the fastest and slowest websites on Cyber Monday.

Methodology

This Cyber Week, we are focusing on three performance and user experience indicators for the Digital Commerce 360 Top 1000 leading online retailers: Largest Contentful Paint (LCP), Onload, and Time to Interactive.

• Largest Contentful Paint (LCP) is a Core Web Vital measuring perceived load speed because it represents how quickly the main content of a webpage is loaded. To provide a frictionless experience and better business outcomes, sites should aim to have an LCP of 2.5 seconds or less. Looking at one study, for example, product pages can see a 40% to 50% lower conversion rate when comparing users that experience a 2-second LCP versus a 4 to 5-second LCP.
• Onload is the average time required for the server to load all content on a page completely—everything from JavaScript, CSS, images, and more. Removing friction by improving page load time has been shown to contribute to higher conversion rates and revenue. For one online business, friction costs nearly half a billion dollars annually.
• Time to Interactive (TTI) is the time it takes for a webpage to become fully interactive. When a site appears fully loaded but nothing happens when the user tries interacting with it, that can cause major user friction, resulting in revenue loss.

The below report is based on Home Page measurements collected by Blue Triangle Synthetic Monitoring.

The Top 20 Fastest Sites

The 20 Fastest Retail and eCommerce Websites Ranked by Largest Contentful Paint (LCP)

The Top 20 Slowest Sites

The 20 Slowest Retail and eCommerce Websites Ranked by Largest Contentful Paint (LCP)

Key Takeaways

Although Thanksgiving Day and Black Friday have become eCommerce holidays versus in-store blowouts, Cyber Monday continues to be the biggest online shopping day of the year.

And this year, pulling in $12.4 billion, it became the biggest online shopping day of all time, fueled by discounts and BNPL.

As we now close out Cyber Week, it’s important to remember that consumers have high expectations for a frictionless experience every day, not just during seasonal peaks.

“Great deals are happening online during Black Friday or Cyber Monday, but the best deals are actually happening during other parts of the year,” says Mike Lively on The Frictionless Experience.

He emphasizes the value of ongoing testing and planning to convert more visitors and retain customers throughout the entire year.

Listen below or wherever you get your favorite podcasts.

Blue Triangle 2023 Cyber Week Report

• Thanksgiving Day 2023: The Fastest and Slowest Retail Websites
• Black Friday 2023: The Fastest and Slowest Retail Websites