Study: Web sites holding up under early holiday pressure

E-commerce companies are doing a good job so far this holiday season of whisking customers through their Web sites quickly, according to a study released Wednesday.

Internet research group Keynote Systems said the performance of e-commerce sites is strong, but there are signs that the rising holiday traffic caused some sites to slow slightly in the past week. Keynote measures how long it takes to log on to a site, among other barometers.

Sites that saw something of a slowdown in performance were Kmart's BlueLight.com, CDNow and eToys, according to San Mateo, Calif.-based Keynote.

eToys' site took 3.34 seconds to download last week, compared with 2.87 seconds the week prior, the study said. CDNow's performance slowed to 4.13 seconds from 3.80 seconds, and BlueLight went from 3.96 seconds to 5.29 seconds.

One of the better performers last week was Macys.com, the Internet arm of the giant brick-and-mortar department store. According to the study, Macys.com was better at allowing customers to enter its front door last week than the week prior.

Keynote said it took customers about 16 seconds to download the site's front door during the week ended Nov. 11. By the week ended Nov. 18, Macy's had improved to about 6 seconds.

Keynote said it used T1 and T3 lines to gauge sites' performance under the "best case scenario."