January sales is one of the biggest event for the ecommerce, especially in Western Europe. After analyzing the web performance of 100+ top online retailers on Christmas, we decided to repeat the same analysis.
Just like for our previous performance report, we looked at the same metrics: the uptime & speed.
Result… 15.716 minutes of total downtime!
Converting it and it’s like closing your shop during 11 straight days! Our panel gathers the most visited online stores in Belgium and France in 10 diferents sectors. In short, we monitored 130 e-commerce sites during 30 days.
Here’s what we’ve discovered:
❌ Downtime rate increases by 44% compared to Christmas
❌ Leisure & Electronics sectors cumulated 7 days of downtime
❌ In average, online retailers were down for 2 hours
5 ecommerce sites that suffer the most from downtime
Take a sneak peek into the study:
- What’s the web performance for January sales 2018?
- How reliable are the top e-commerce sites?
- Why the uptime rate remains worrying?
[alert type=“success“ icon-size=“hide-icon“] ⏱ Estimated reading time: 4 minutes[/alert]
Web Performance overview
Online retailers struggled to remains available!
Looking at the overall uptime performance, 84 out of 130 sites experienced major outages. Comparing to Christmas, the number of sites affected by downtime increased by 44%! The total downtime accumulated by the biggest players, reached 11 days 1 hour and 26 minutes for January.
In other words, that means less reliability for more websites!
On our Christmas report, the most performing websites were mainly american, french or dutch. The situation has changed this time, 50% of the top 10 reliable sites are from the USA. The good news is that 2 belgian websites entered in the top ranking list!
Top 5 fastest & most reliable e-commerce sites
- Pizza.be 🇬🇧
- GAP 🇺🇸
- Dell 🇺🇸
- A.S Adventure 🇧🇪
- E5 Mode 🇧🇪
[alert type=“success“ icon-size=“hide-icon“]Click here to discover the web performance of 130 e-commerce! 📊[/alert]
Page load time got better!
Page speed is with no doubt an important factor for ecommerce. In fact, 84 out of 130 sites monitored load under 0,5 second, improving the previous performance by 6%. In average, most of the online shops have a response time of 0.08 second.
E-leclerc is the fastest site, loading in 0.084 second!
Load time performance per sector:
- 👕 Clothing: 0.350 second
- 🖥 Electronics: 0.454 second
- 🍗 Food: 0.548 second
- 💄 Beauty: 0.687 second
- 🏸 Leisure: 0.577 second
[alert type=“success“ icon-size=“hide-icon“]Click here to access to the speed performance report of 100 + online stores! 📊[/alert]
How reliable are the top e-commerce sites?
Worst uptime performance ever!
With an average uptime rate of 86%, the belgian home retailer, Leboutte.be has lost big!
Cause of the issue?
The SSL certificate was expired…
Third party badges, such as ssl certificate is one of the most important trust signals for e-commerce sites. Since October 2017, Google announced that sites without „HTTPS“ will be marked as unsecured!
What’s the point of having a fast website if it’s not accessible?
The websites included in the graphics above, are almost the same as the ones from the previous report. It seems that they are not aware about why monitoring is crucial for an e-commerce site…
H&M’s site is a great example. With an average uptime rate of 98.5% of uptime, the Swedish clothing company lost around 600.000 unique visitors out of its 40 Millions of monthly traffic!
5 Biggest outages detected:
- Leboutte: 14/01 – 3 days 19hours – expired certificate
- Wehkamp: 07/01 – 10 hours 26min – No response
- Medion: 31/01 – 18min – Service unavailable (503)
- Pharmaclic: 03/01 – 2 hours 40min – Bad Gateway (502)
- H&M: 26/01 – 2 hours 27min – Service unavailable (503)
[alert type=“success“ icon-size=“hide-icon“]💡 Discover the complete list of HTTP errors when monitoring your website.[/alert]
How fast are the top e-commerce sites?
Mobile Vikings‘ site struggles with load time!
With an average load time of 1639 milliseconds, the belgian telecom provider has still some improvements to make when it comes to page speed optimization. Their page response time hasn’t got better since our last studies!
Nevertheless, the overall speed performance is good for most of the websites monitored. According to our data, the electronics and clothing industry seems to have put a lot of efforts into page speed. The french retailer E-leclerc remains the leader while pizza.be took over H&M’s place in comparison to our previous report.
Methodology of the study
Our methodology remains the same as the one used for our previous survey. The data collected in terms of uptime rate and response time come from our monitoring tool.
- Most visited e-shops: Belgium, France and USA
- Element monitored: Homepage
- Checks frequency: 1 minute
- Tests performed: from 9 monitoring centers
The average uptime remains worrying!
Many online retailers counts on key events to boost their online revenues.
We have clearly seen that the uptime rate decreased during those crucial dates. As a matter of fact, the amount of websites impacted increased significantly from Christmas to the end of January.
Most of the big e-shops have a fast site, loading in less than 0.1 second. On the other hand, our study showed that still too many have reliability issues.
Maybe some of them are hosted by OVH…
The french hosting provider was down (again) during the January sales. According to its status page, 15 services were impacted: ADSL, (dedicated) cloud, emails, domain name, … 
Learn from the big players‘ mistakes!
Our study showed that those big e-commerce sites were down in average 2 hours/month. Your online store might not be as big as H&M but you are not immune to downtime!
Monitoring your home page is one step to insure your e-commerce reliability but you shouldn’t stop there. You want to focus on your key pages and monitor the whole conversion funnel.
Because at the end of the day…
What’s the point of selling online if your customers can’t reach your site?