Thanksgiving Day 2022: The Fastest and Slowest Retail Websites

It’s no surprise that many consumers would go online to get their holiday shopping done. Since the pandemic accelerated online adoption, eCommerce has become a convenient way for consumers to navigate their holiday shopping.

However, online sales on Thanksgiving Day last year were flat, coming in at $5.1 billion. New estimates from Adobe Analytics indicate that Thanksgiving Day 2022 online spending is expected to decline from the previous year. This could be a result of retailers and eCommerce websites offering more deals in-store and online throughout the year to clear a surplus of inventory.

Let's see how the numbers were affected!

According to reports from Bloomberg News, online sales climbed 2.9% to $5.29 billion on Thanksgiving Day, slightly ahead of early estimates and Thanksgiving Day 2021 performance. Additionally, mobile shopping accounted for 55% of sales.

Methodology

This Cyber Week, we are focusing on two critical web performance and user experience indicators – Largest Contentful 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. This helps give you an idea of how quickly the page renders the most important content for the user and the point at which they will start interacting with the page.

According to Google’s Core Web Vitals Team, an LCP of 2.5 seconds or faster is considered good. An LCP between 2.5 and 4.0 seconds needs improvement, and greater than 4.0 seconds is considered poor.

Why does LCP matter? Read more about how LCP correlates to business outcomes.

Time to Interactive (TTI) is the amount of time it takes for the web page to become fully interactive. It helps identify situations where a page may look ready for interaction but isn’t, thus creating a frustrating user experience. According to Google Lighthouse, a Time to Interactive of 0-3.8 seconds is fast, 3.9-7.3 seconds is moderate, and over 7.3 seconds is slow.

The below report is based on Home Page measurements collected by Blue Triangle Synthetic Monitoring, taken from 5 U.S. locations.

The 20 Fastest Retail Websites

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

The 20 Slowest Retail Websites

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

Key Takeaways

• Early in the evening, Blue Triangle observed that traffic this year mirrored the patterns from last year. With all eyes on Time to Interactive (TTI), Largest Contentful Paint (LCP), and other key performance and user experience metrics, especially those correlated with revenue, Blue Triangle noted ebbs and flows throughout Thanksgiving Day with volume and traffic rising like the tide.
• Thanksgiving Day 2022 online spending hit a record of $5.29 billion, an increase of 2.9% year-over-year. It must be noted, however, that this may not point to higher sales volumes but rather increases in prices due to higher inflation than Thanksgiving Day 2021. 
• As expected, there was a Black Friday midnight burst in activity, with a general pickup in traffic and revenue. This was most likely related to retailers' and eCommerce websites’ Black Friday sales content, such as email marketing campaigns, driving traffic and impacting revenue by the minute. But more on this to come in the next installment of the Blue Triangle Cyber Week Report!