By the Numbers:

Top Retailers

The Keynote Top Retailers Index benchmarks the home page performance of the leading online retail sites. Measurements are take from the ten major U.S. metropolitan areas (Boston, Chicago, Dallas, Detroit, Houston, Los Angeles, New York, Philadelphia, San Francisco, and Washington, D.C.) on high-speed links attached to key points on the largest U.S. Internet Service Provider (ISP) backbones.

With average home page load times of just over two seconds, top retailers are among the best-performing sites in any of the Keynote performance indices.  Availability is outstanding as well, with 27 sites available 100 percent of the time in the test week (though the average is pulled down by a few extremely poor sites).  Whether these numbers will hold during the surge of holiday traffic, however, can only be determined by rigorous, proactive testing well ahead of the season.