The most romantic holiday is over now, and so is our 2021 Valentine's Day Online Retail Performance and Uptime Report. It was predicted that over half of the adult Americans, 52% would celebrate 2021 Valentine's Day spending $21.8 billion, and 38% would buy their presents online.

The top 5 Valentine's Day Purchases were candy (54%), greeting cards (44%), flowers (36%), evening out (24%), and jewellery (18%).

For the 14th year in a raw WebSitePulse monitored seven of the leading gift shopping websites during the St. Valentine’s Day fever, and compiled the WebSitePulse 2021 Valentine's Day Online Retail Performance and Uptime Report.

For this Performance Report, WebSitePulse measured the performance of the websites' home pages as well as a complete web transaction like an end-user would interact with the website.

The report measures both Uptime and Response Time of the websites as well as measurements of the multi-step online transactions which were made every 15 minutes, simultaneously from 3 different monitoring locations: Washington DC (US East Coast), San Francisco, CA (US West Coast) and Chicago, IL (US Central).

The overall speed of the monitored online retailers’ websites was quite good during the whole monitored period. We have found out the daily average response time from all monitored websites was 2.827 sec. which is 0.646 sec slower than last year’s. The daily average responses by locations are as follow:

• Washington DC (US East Coast) – 2.600 sec
• San Francisco, CA (US West Coast) – 2.993 sec
• Chicago, IL (US Central) – 2.887 sec

This year 1800flowers.com was the speed leader among the seven monitored gift shopping websites with an average response time of 1.327 seconds, followed by harryanddavid.com (1.716 sec) and brookstone.com (2.354 sec). Far away at the bottom of the table for the third year in a row was vermonteddybear.com with 4.638 seconds average response time, which is 4.783 sec. faster than the last year's Valentine's Day Report. However, the delay surely frustrated many of its visitors and led to a revenue loss.

The overall uptime of the monitored online retailers’ websites was nearly uninterrupted during the whole monitored period.

The daily average uptime for the entire group of 7 websites for 2021 St. Valentine’s Day was 99.92%. The daily average uptime by locations are as follow:

• Washington DC (US East Coast) – 99.91%
• San Francisco, CA (US West Coast) – 99.92%
• Chicago, IL (US Central) – 99.94 %

Only three of the stores this year were 100% online for the whole monitored period — 1800flowers.com, brookstone.com, and helzberg.com. Vermonteddybear.com was the website with the lowest uptime this year — 99.598 % uptime, which was not accessible for a little bit over an hour during the whole monitored period.

Average Response times for the whole period

#	Target	San Francisco	Chicago	Washington	Avg. resp. time
1	1800flowers.com	1.622	1.209	1.150	1.327
2	harryanddavid.com	2.380	1.330	1.437	1.716
3	brookstone.com	2.612	2.228	2.221	2.354
4	ftd.com	2.225	2.851	2.101	2.392
5	pagoda.com	3.286	3.593	2.175	3.018
6	helzberg.com	4.888	4.156	3.986	4.343
7	vermonteddybear.com	3.937	4.840	5.137	4.638

Average Uptime for the whole period

#	Target	San Francisco	Chicago	Washington	Avg. uptime
1	brookstone.com	100.000%	100.000%	100.000%	100.000%
2	helzberg.com	100.000%	100.000%	100.000%	100.000%
3	1800flowers.com	100.000%	100.000%	100.000%	100.000%
4	harryanddavid.com	99.960%	100.000%	99.963%	99.974%
5	ftd.com	99.970%	99.988%	99.946%	99.968%
6	pagoda.com	99.885%	99.932%	99.919%	99.912%
7	vermonteddybear.com	99.605%	99.639%	99.550%	99.598%