---
title: "Improving performance by prefetching product pages from Etsy Search"
description: "Etsy’s search and web performance teams tested the Speculation Rules API (SRA) to reduce loading time for product listing pages reached from desktop organic search. They added a speculationrules configuration that prefetches eligible listing HTML after a 200-millisecond hover, using URL and data-attribute selectors with moderate eagerness; unlike link prefetch, SRA uses both memory and HTTP caches. The experiment required attention to a two-page memory limit, five-minute retention, non-cacheable listing HTML, video hover behavior, cookies, new-tab targets, and analytics events triggered during prefetches. Results showed 23.6% faster 75th-percentile TTFB, with improvements of 20.7% in FCP, 21.1% in LCP, 20.4% in DOMContentLoaded, and 10.6% in Page Load, while roughly one in 14 prefetches led to navigation."
---

# Improving performance by prefetching product pages from Etsy Search

[Etsy](https://yomu.fyi/company/etsy) · David Weinzimmer · Oct 29, 2025

**Type:** Problem & solution

## Summary

Etsy’s search and web performance teams tested the Speculation Rules API (SRA) to reduce loading time for product listing pages reached from desktop organic search. They added a speculationrules configuration that prefetches eligible listing HTML after a 200-millisecond hover, using URL and data-attribute selectors with moderate eagerness; unlike link prefetch, SRA uses both memory and HTTP caches. The experiment required attention to a two-page memory limit, five-minute retention, non-cacheable listing HTML, video hover behavior, cookies, new-tab targets, and analytics events triggered during prefetches. Results showed 23.6% faster 75th-percentile TTFB, with improvements of 20.7% in FCP, 21.1% in LCP, 20.4% in DOMContentLoaded, and 10.6% in Page Load, while roughly one in 14 prefetches led to navigation.

## Context

Etsy wanted to improve the performance of product listing pages reached from search results. Listing HTML is non-cacheable, and prefetching introduces operational concerns involving memory eviction, cookies, redirects, browser tabs, video hover behavior, and analytics side effects.

## Approach / What changed

The search team ran an A/B experiment on desktop Chromium browsers, adding a speculationrules script that matched eligible listing links and prefetching them after 200 milliseconds of hover with moderate eagerness. The teams also adapted caching and event logging behavior to limit the effects of speculative requests.

## Takeaways

- Speculative prefetching keeps pages in both memory and HTTP caches, whereas link prefetch uses only the HTTP cache; however, only two speculative prefetched pages remain in memory at once.
- Etsy used the Sec-Purpose: prefetch header to identify speculative requests and make otherwise non-cacheable pages cacheable for five minutes, helping preserve prefetched HTML.
- Prefetching can trigger cookies and analytics side effects; Etsy cached event payloads during prefetches and moved logging into the destination bundle after activation.

**Tags:** [Caching](https://yomu.fyi/topic/caching), [Performance](https://yomu.fyi/topic/performance), [Speculation Rules API](https://yomu.fyi/topic/speculation-rules-api)

- Source: [Etsy](https://www.etsy.com/codeascraft/search-prefetching-performance)
- Source URL: https://www.etsy.com/codeascraft/search-prefetching-performance
- Ingested by Yomu: 2026-09-09T16:05:13.109Z

[Read original post](https://www.etsy.com/codeascraft/search-prefetching-performance)