Which Microstock Agencies have the Fastest Websites?

Operating the technology to support a successful microstock business is not a simple task. There seems to always be a handful of agencies experiencing difficulty keeping their websites online and performing at a good standard. Microstock agencies must keep a massive amount of photo storage space permanently available. They must also meet extremely large volumes of demand for access to their servers from buyers downloading and contributors uploading.

I did some research using online tools to compare the performance of the top microstock websites. Here’s the results.

Agency	Load Time iWebTool	Per KB Speed iWebTool	Load Time Alexa	Speed Ranking Alexa	Load Time WebWait
iStockphoto	0.4	0.02	6.4	91% are faster	7.07
Shutterstock	0.37	0.01	4.1	78% are faster	2.38
Dreamstime	0.37	0.03	5.3	86% are faster	2.5
Fotolia	0.7	0.05	7.7	94% are faster	3.35
LuckyOliver	0.65	0.02	5.1	85% are faster	2.65
StockXpert	0.29	0.01	3.7	74% are faster	3.51
BigStockPhoto	0.39	0.01	2.4	53% are faster	3.76
CanStockPhoto	0.37	0.03	2.1	54% are faster	2.25
123rf	2.07	0.06	5.3	87% are faster	4.32
Crestock	1.11	0.04	1.6	65% are faster	1.17

All measurements in seconds unless otherwise stated.

Each of these measures have their flaws, but together they provide a workable guide to the speeds of the websites. They are also measuring just the front page of each website, and given many have large graphics, this may not be an accurate reflection of the true user experience.

Load Time measures the amount of time it takes for the page to load in the browser. This will vary from person to person depending on the quality of their Internet access. It will also very from time to time depending on demand at the website and your Internet provider.

Per KB Speed measures how fast the data is delivered by the website’s servers. This measure ignores the size of the page.

When these statistics are normalized across the sample we see there isn’t much variation. However, we can determine the best and worst.

Slowest three websites: iStockphoto, Fotolia and 123rf

Fastest three websites: Crestock, CanStockPhoto and BigStockPhoto

---

Posted August 5th, 2007 by Lee Torrens