2016 Ecommerce Stats: Black Friday Through Cyber Monday

Over the years, Black Friday through Cyber Monday sales have continuously increased. Just this year Black Friday sales hit another record, with mobile for the first time surpassing $1 billion in revenue and total online sales extending beyond $3 billion.

As online shopping peaks, here at WP Engine we ensure our customers’ sites can scale to meet traffic demands with an environment specifically designed for scaling WordPress.

Site speed is also another important factor to ensuring sales are maximized during high traffic events. A sluggish site can deter the customer, resulting in shopping cart abandonment. However, sites on WP Engine’s hosting environment have shown an average site speed improvement of 68 percent.

While our 50,000-plus customers range from agencies to enterprise to small boutiques and blogs, here’s a scope of what ecommerce activity looked like from Black Friday through Cyber Monday on our platform:

As traffic spiked between Black Friday and Cyber Monday, ecommerce sites on our platform experienced over 1.8 billion unique visitors. That’s a 21 percent increase from last year.

And boy were we busy! Requests on our platform exceeded 2 billion, reaching 2.8 billion. If you think about 2.8 billion in miles, that would get you to the outer edges of our solar system.

Our proprietary technology EverCache is one of the most scalable WordPress architectures on the planet. Customers who host their websites on our platform are able to serve media incredibly quickly across the globe. In fact, over Thanksgiving weekend WP Engine served up 533 terabytes of data across our 13 data centers worldwide.

Conclusion

Ecommerce sites not only win with WordPress, but they are enhanced to deliver amazing digital experiences by meeting user’s site speed and uptime demands on WP Engine’s managed hosting platform.

Looking to learn more? Check out these free resources: Ecommerce on WordPress: A Getting Started Guide and Why WordPress is for Ecommerce, Regardless of Platform.