Minnesota’s Online Retailers Prep for Black Thursday Eve, Black Friday, and Cyber Monday
Based on Internet Retailer magazine’s listing of the Internet Retailer 500, there are 12 Minnesota online retailers that ranked in the top 500 in 2011. With that in mind, Dotcom-Monitor (also a Minnesota-based company) set-up basic website monitoring on these 12 top Minnesota online company homepages (run your own test here). The website monitoring gathered information on Minnesota online retailers webpage speed, uptime/downtime, and details on the page element performance. By testing their home pages using an IE browser running every 15 minutes from nine North American locations over the course of a week, Dotcom-Monitor was able to pinpoint issues that are occurring on these Minnesota online company websites.
Company stakeholders are also carefully watching when highly publicized website crashes (such as Target’s website crash in 2011) impact Minnesota online retailers revenues and reputation with buyers. In 2012, according to Internet Retailer magazine nearly all Minnesota online companies are monitoring their Web apps for performance. Monitoring helps these companies detect and diagnosis website errors during critical periods like the upcoming Black Thursday Eve, Black Friday, Cyber Monday, and the Holiday shopping season.
Top Companies in Minnesota Webpage Speed
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The average total page render time for these Minnesota websites was 6.255 seconds. The fastest average total render time was 2.86 seconds. The slowest average page render was 16.16 seconds. The website speed for these Minnesota websites varied greatly due to many factors, especially the number and type of elements on the pages. Slow page render times reduce customer conversions resulting in site and shopping cart abandonment. Moreover, an Aberdeen Group study has concluded that each 1-second delay in website load speed resulted in a 7% drop in customer conversions.
| Minnesota Top 12 Internet Retailers* | Average Page Render Time in IE browser |
| Christopher and Banks | 7.4107 |
| Deluxe | 2.8631 |
| Fingerhut | 4.0743 |
| Bellacor | 6.5951 |
| Best Buy | 3.916 |
| Buyonlinenow | 5.6782 |
| Select Comfort | 8.1742 |
| ShopNBC | 16.1606 |
| Target | 4.3907 |
| ID Wholesaler | 6.8542 |
| Northern Tool | 4.0961 |
| Rockler | 4.8527 |
| 6.255 | |
| *Based on Internet Retailer magazine “Internet Retailer 500” ranking | |
Impacts to Minnesota Online Retailers Website Performance
Impacts to page render time take many forms. One area Dotcom-Monitor noted in the Minnesota online retailers testing was the number of third-party page elements served by third-party servers (social media, seals, chat, mobile apps, widgets etc.) that had issues, and in turn, impacted the websites. While overall uptime for Minnesota retailer website’s was excellent at over 99.5%, testing has revealed intermittent issues on a few websites caused by both third-party elements and primary servers impacting a user’s experience, including:
- webpage ”blank space” where flash elements were not loading properly
- page references to a third-party online chat application that returned server errors
- page references to a third-party online chat button gif that did not load properly
- a connection to a mobile app from a third-party provider that was timing out
Avoid a slow website by monitoring performance for free, no strings attached, trial account. Sign up here and talk to a Web Performance Expert to improve your website uptime, website speed, and website performance.
Click the Dotcom-Monitor free speed test here to see how your website compares with these companies.
