Every holiday season, retailers launch campaigns, promotions intensify, and traffic surges to annual peaks. But beneath the headlines about record sales, there’s a quieter performance taking place — one that determines which brands convert shoppers and which ones lose them to slow load times and unresponsive pages.
This year, Yottaa set out to measure exactly that performance.
The Yottaa Site Speed Awards recognize the retailers that delivered the fastest, most reliable digital experiences during the 2025 holiday shopping season. These real-world measurements captured during the busiest shopping weeks of the year, reflecting how sites actually performed when it mattered most.
Why We Created the Site Speed Awards
In conversations with eCommerce leaders, digital teams, and developers, one theme kept emerging: the industry lacks a consistent benchmark for real-world site performance during peak traffic.
Traditional lab tests don’t capture the conditions that define holiday retail — simultaneous third-party scripts, media-heavy pages under load, and shoppers arriving with high intent and low patience. While tools like Yottaa’s Web Performance Index provide ongoing performance visibility, they don’t explicitly compare competitors during a sustained high-pressure period.
That’s what the Site Speed Awards were built to do. Specifically, we wanted to recognize the brands that thrived under holiday pressure and help others learn from their success.
Holiday traffic exposes everything: how well third-party tools are managed, whether infrastructure holds under campaign spikes, and which sites succeed in performance. The brands recognized today proved they could deliver fast, stable experiences when the stakes were highest.
How We Measured Performance
To identify the fastest sites of the 2025 holiday season, we used Yottaa’s Health Score — a comprehensive measurement grounded in real shopper sessions across North America’s most popular eCommerce sites. The Health Score uses Core Web Vital data and assesses the performance across four performance categories: backend, rendering, interactivity and visual stability. Each pillar contributes to an overall score out of 100, with higher scores indicating faster, more reliable experiences. A Health Score of 80 represents passing Core Web Vitals.
After calculating Health Scores, we applied an additional eligibility filter using the Tranco list, which ranks websites based on aggregated global traffic signals. Within each industry category, we limited consideration to the top 50% of sites by Tranco rank. This step ensured rankings reflected performance among established, high-traffic retailers — not low-volume outliers.
Our rankings incorporate:
- Real-user performance data captured during the busiest shopping weeks, not synthetic tests
- Core Web Vitals scores that reflect rendering speed, interaction responsiveness, and visual stability
- Consistency over time across the holiday period, not just isolated moments of speed
- Stability during traffic spikes when campaigns launched and shopper volume surged
This methodology brings together user-centric metrics, engineering reality, and operational resilience, giving retailers a meaningful benchmark for digital experience quality.
The Site Speed Awards Winners
The brands below demonstrated exceptional performance during the highest-pressure shopping period of the year. They represent the new benchmark for what’s possible when performance discipline meets real-world execution.
Top 10 Fastest Sites Overall
- JetPens.com
- Sports Warehouse
- Von Maur
- BigBadToyStore
- STUSSY
- evo
- Entertainment Earth Inc.
- PropertyRoom.com Inc.
- OfficeSupply.com
- Forever 21
Category Winners by Vertical
Apparel & Fashion: Von Maur
Automotive & Accessories: Speedway Motors Inc.
Consumer Electronics: Lexmark
Flowers & Gifts: Personalization Mall
Food & Beverage: Wine.com
Hardware & Home Improvement: Woodcraft
Health & Beauty: Goop
Housewares & Home Furnishings: Tupperware
Jewelry: Bob’s Watches
Mass Merchant: Hammacher Schlemmer
Office Supplies: JetPens.com
Specialty: PropertyRoom.com
Sporting Goods/Outdoor: Sports Warehouse
Toys & Hobbies: BigBadToyStore
What the Data Revealed
While we’re celebrating the winners today, the broader patterns in the data tell an important story about what separates fast sites from slow ones.
Some quick takeaways:
The biggest brands didn’t always win. In fact, some of the highest-performing sites came from mid-market retailers, while several top 100 brands struggled with basic performance metrics.
Interaction to Next Paint (INP) separated leaders from everyone else. Sites with slow rendering don’t just look slow; they feel slow. The winners maintained responsive interactions even under heavy load, while underperformers saw interaction delays spike into multi-second ranges.
Mobile execution was the true test. Desktop performance has been largely standardized. The winners maintained device parity, delivering consistent experiences across mobile and desktop. Low performers showed massive mobile performance gaps, sometimes dropping 20+ Health Score points on mobile devices versus their desktop scores.
Winners governed performance holistically. The fastest sites maintained excellence across all four performance pillars: backend speed, interactivity, rendering, and visual stability. Sites that made tradeoffs — prioritizing one metric while neglecting others — couldn’t sustain performance under holiday pressure.
Dive deeper into what separates the winners from the rest with our analysis, “What the Fastest Sites Did Differently: Insights from Yottaa’s Inaugural Site Speed Awards.” The data reveals clear performance thresholds and strategies that define website performance excellence in modern eCommerce.
What’s Next
If your brand didn’t appear on this year’s list of winners, the holiday season still provided valuable insight. Peak traffic exposes issues that remain invisible during normal patterns, and those insights can become your roadmap for next year.
The Site Speed Awards will return next year (and maybe even throughout 2026!), providing a recurring benchmark for retailers committed to performance excellence. Whether you’re evaluating your current performance, planning infrastructure improvements, or looking to control third-party complexity, the data behind these rankings can guide your strategy.
Congratulations to all the Site Speed Awards winners from the 2025 holiday season. You set the bar for what fast, reliable eCommerce experiences look like, and proved that performance discipline pays off when it matters most.
Want to see how your site compares? Request a performance assessment to understand where you stand and what improvements would have the biggest impact on shopper experience.
