The most romantic holiday of the year, St. Valentine, has passed, leaving many good memories despite the Covid-19 global pandemic. This year, even more people were expected to celebrate it — 53% of the adult Americans with a total amount spent $23.9 billion, which is an average of $175.41, according to NRF.

The top 5 Valentine's Day Purchases were candy (56%), greeting cards (40%), flowers (37%), dining out (31%), and jewelry (22%).

For the 15th year in a raw WebSitePulse monitored six of the leading gift shopping websites during the St. Valentine's Day fever and compiled the WebSitePulse 2022 Valentine's Day Online Retail Performance and Uptime Report.

For this Performance Report, WebSitePulse measured the performance of the websites' home pages and 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 found that the daily average response time from all monitored websites was 3.344 sec. which is 0.517 sec slower than last year's. The daily average responses by locations are as follow:

• Washington DC (US East Coast) – 3.143 sec
• San Francisco, CA (US West Coast) – 3.577 sec
• Chicago, IL (US Central) – 3.312 sec

This year harryanddavid.com was the speed leader among the six monitored gift shopping websites with an average response time of 2.075 seconds, followed by vermonteddybear.com (2.972 sec) and ftd.com (3.243 sec). Far away at the bottom of the table for the third year in a row was helzberg.com with 4.573 seconds average response time, which is 0.060 sec. faster than 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 six websites for 2022 St. Valentine's Day was 99.82%. The daily average uptime by location are as follow:

• Washington DC (US East Coast) – 99.81%
• San Francisco, CA (US West Coast) – 99.82%
• Chicago, IL (US Central) – 99.82 %

This year, only two of the six monitoring web stores were 100% online for the whole monitored period — helzberg.com and ftd.com. Brookstone.com was down for nearly 2.5 minutes on the exact holiday date, and vermonteddybear.com was down for almost 17 minutes on the day after. At the bottom of the availability table in our report is harryanddavid.com which was inaccessible for more than two and a half hours on the 16 th – the last monitored date.

Average Response times for the whole period

#	Target	San Francisco	Chicago	Washington	Avg. resp. time
1	harryanddavid.com	2.631	1.679	1.916	2.075
2	vermonteddybear.com	2.409	2.878	3.628	2.972
3	ftd.com	3.975	2.770	2.983	3.243
4	homesick.com	3.450	3.878	2.885	3.404
5	brookstone.com	3.536	3.988	2.890	3.471
6	helzberg.com	5.102	4.407	4.210	4.573

Average Uptime for the whole period

#	Target	San Francisco	Chicago	Washington	Avg. uptime
1	ftd.com	100.000%	100.000%	100.000%	100.000%
2	harryanddavid.com	100.000%	100.000%	100.000%	100.000%
3	helzberg.com	100.000%	100.000%	100.000%	100.000%
4	homesick.com	99.981%	100.000%	100.000%	99.994%
5	brookstone.com	99.983%	99.982%	100.000%	99.988%
6	vermonteddybear.com	99.918%	99.931%	99.907%	99.919%