The holiday season is upon us – the “Super Bowl of Retail”. Deals are flowing. Web traffic is flowing.
And while shoppers have gotten early access to deals throughout November, Thanksgiving marks the official start of the busy retail holiday season. We’re about to find out who prepared for the uptick in traffic and who didn’t.
Beauty retailer Ulta experienced an outage on Thanksgiving:
Many retailers had unexpected difficulties in years past.
Outages are a retailer's worst nightmare. That's revenue you can't get back.
But aside from site outages, increases in traffic can lead to slower page load times.
The top 25 retailers slowed by nearly 4% on Thanksgiving Day, compared to the previous Thursday's data. We've seen a 4% slowdown mean millions in lost revenue. (Blue Triangle can quantify that!)
The findings in this post based on hundreds of home page measurements across 5 US locations using Blue Triangle's Synthetic Monitoring.
See speed rankings of the top 500 retailers: Access the Retail Industry Benchmarks
I hope this blog post was helpful for you. Should you have any questions, comments or concerns, please send me an email: josh@bluetriangle.com.