Etsy has shifted to TLS security sitewide

If you go to Etsy now, you may notice that every single page starts with an “https://” rather than an “http://”.

Based on a post on Etsy’s Code As Craft blog, it sounds as if this is a fairly recent change — one that makes the site more secure but also makes pages load a bit slower. We know all this because Etsy has been reporting its site performance every few months.

We like transparency. Whether it’s Kickstarter and VHX talking about the actual money moving on their platforms or Etsy talking about how fast data is moving, we like it. The latter topic has been covered on the Etsy dev blog, Code As Craft, which we’ve been following closely here.

The developers recently reported on the Q2 performance indicators for the handmade goods site. The dev team takes this stuff super seriously. We’ve spoken with a number of its developers informally around Etsy-hosted events, and page load times are something they watch closely and think about a lot.

It can be important, in part, because the pages are serving products with finite inventories to people all over the world. The faster they load, the less likely they are to tell a user that something is still available that actually isn’t.

Here are a few key points:

• Etsy saw a nice increase in search speed because they started using Memcached. The dev team is looking to bolster this system and believe it will improve performance sitewide.
• Tests are run in New York, London, Chicago, Seattle and Miami, using Catchpoint, every two hours.
• The sitewide TLS security upgrade has slowed webpage response across the site. The company is looking at a strategy developed by Google, SPDY, as a way to mitigate this drag on the site.

Google recently announced that it will be rewarding sites that use TLS protocol, by boosting their search rankings.