Etsy, one of the best places to get handcrafted art through a simple community-powered ecommerce community, shared recently their record-breaking week through Black Friday and Cyber Monday.
The reason this could be of interest to more than a few of you here is the fact that their site, Code as Craft, runs WordPress’ VIP Services and is a neat showcase of a simple implementation that really works, especially with their insight and transparency around their sites and how they manage all that traffic (which performance and WordPress IT nerds would gush over).
Here are some of the stats that they shared that resulted in their crazy weekend:
Here are a few more statistics from the weekend:
- For the Etsy marketplace overall, sales between Black Friday and Cyber Monday increased more than 80% year-over-year, the second year in a row our annual growth rate has increased, even with many more members and transactions to compare.
- Between Black Friday and Cyber Monday, first-time buyers increased by more than 90% compared to 2011, totalling nearly a third of all buyers over the weekend.
- More sellers made sales on Etsy on Cyber Monday than at any time in our 7-year history, and the average sales per shop grew 26% compared to 2011, double the growth from last year.
- Between Black Friday and Cyber Monday, more than 22 million visits to Etsy generated more than a quarter of a billion page views.
- Almost 1 in 3 visitors were shopping on mobile devices (compared to 1 in 4 on a typical day).
- 1 in 4 orders occurred between buyers and sellers in different countries, highlighting the truly global nature of our marketplace.
Most of us would love to see that type of traffic numbers (and the resulting sales) via our properties any day, right?
One thing of note that the Etsy development team mentions specifically is that server-side caching is and continues to remain one of their most important features that provides such a robust and consistent experience for their users.
It really does go without saying – if you’re not using caching in your WordPress blog or site then you’re not providing your readers and end-users the very best experience.
You better jump on it!
Currently, WP Daily is using a fairly vanilla installation of WP Super Cache with the following settings:
- Mod_rewrite to serve cache files
- Compression of pages
- We don’t cache pages for our known users
- Cache rebuilding while new files are generated
What about you? What caching plugins and services do you run to keep things in tip-top shape?
4 Comments