User Friction & Site Performance Blog | Blue Triangle

Black Friday 2018: The Fastest and Slowest Retail Websites

Written by Josh Carter | Nov 26, 2018 3:06:22 PM

Black Friday online sales reached $6.22B. That's a 23.6% increase from last year.

But with the increase in shopping activity, many retailers experienced website outages and slow-downs, including Lowe's, Walmart, and J.Crew.

Here's what shoppers saw when they visited Lowes.com at certain points Black Friday:

Collectively, the top 500 eCommerce sites slowed down by 6% on average between Thanksgiving Day and Black Friday.

To make matters worse, IBM Digital Analytics (formerly Coremetrics) had an outage on Black Friday that caused website slow-downs at major retailers, including Dillard's, Victoria's Secret, and Tractor Supply.

This report is based on Home Page measurements run by Blue Triangle's Synthetic Monitoring.

Rank the speeds of the Top 500 eCommerce sites Black Friday - Cyber Monday.

Page speed by vertical

Nearly every retail vertical experienced slow-downs between Thanksgiving Day and Black Friday.

Major retailers

This was due to the IBM Digital Analytics (formerly Coremetrics) outage that impacted the website's load time between 9:00am EST and 4:00pm EST.The Victoria's Secret website slowed down by a whopping 89%.

Who slowed down?

The sites in red indicate those impacted by the IBM Digital Analytics outage.

Who sped up?

Stay up to date

Blue Triangle is working with major retailers like The Home Depot and Lenovo this holiday season to ensure peak performance and optimal revenue.

See where the top 500 retailers stack up weekly: Access the Retail Industry Benchmarks.

Should you have any questions, comments or concerns, please send me an email: josh@bluetriangle.com