Etsy Shares Website Performance Data

Seconds can seem like a long time when you are waiting for a website to load, and shoppers are especially impatient. Online marketplace Etsy said on Wednesday it was satisfied with the amount of time it took for its product listing pages to load, but it was not satisfied with its home page load time.

Etsy published some site performance data in a blog post yesterday and said it would be concentrating on improving the page-load time of its home page over the coming weeks.

The accompanying chart shows page-load times for listings, shops, search, the home page and member profile - the time it takes for each of the pages to laod for members who are signed-in to the site. The numbers in the chart are the number of milliseconds required to generate each type of page for the average and 95th percentile of visitors on Tuesday, August 2nd.

Seth Walker, one of Esy's software engineers, said every page is dynamically generated for every single request because every page is unique. In general, the more information displayed on a page, and the more unique the information on a page is, the more time it will take to assemble that page.

"On average," Walker wrote, "our servers can generate a listing page in a little over a blink of an eye, and for the great majority of requests in less than two eye blinks. That's great, because the listing page is by far the most frequently viewed page on the site."

He said the home page for a signed-in member takes more time to generate than any other.