Why is the Paypal website so slow?

[ScirraTom]

Hi there,

New to this forum.  I'm a web developer for Scirra.com

We sell mainly via Paypal.  Logging into Paypal, searching for transactions, the entire experience is frustratingly slow.

Why is the website so slow, and what are the plans to fix it?  If it continues to be as slow as it is we're happy to find a faster service.

Here's a breakdown of normal times I observe logging in and finding a transaction:

Paypal homepage: 3.5 seconds
Login page: 11 seconds
Processing login: 7 seconds
Getting to homepage: 12 seconds
Click history: 14.5 seconds
Click find a transaction: 4 seconds
Find a transaction on email: 11.5 seconds

I would expect a website like this to load under a few seconds per page.  Clicking the history button and it taking nearly 15 seconds is unusually poor performance.  I'm not even sure how you could write the history page to take that long to load.

[WPB]

We migrated to Paypal from Google Wallet last year as Google Wallet closed, initially we were horrified at how slow and clunky the Paypal merchant experience is in comparison to Google Wallets.

We have developed a number of work arounds to speed things up but the Server speed still seems VERY SLOW for this day and age 2014.

There is nothing slow about our browser or internet connection the slowness is at paypal.

[dylan8888]

I could not agree more.

Paypal is the slowest website on the internet.

I have the new Comcast 50mbps internet, and it takes me 5+ minutes to load a report from yesterday (only about 30 transactions).

I am a developer, and write code for databases frequently.  This must be the worst written and inefficient coding job done in the history of the internet, or they are purposefully slowing down queries to try and frustrate users that attempt to pull large amounts of data.  There are problems with both scenarios.  The second scenario makes no sense, as it is much more efficient to simply program your site to be safe than it is to try and "hack" the server to frustrate potential perpetrators.

So that leads me to believe that Paypal must be running on severely...and I mean SEVERELY outdated servers, that are all located in a single location and bottleneck all of the web traffic.  They are poorly maintained, and the SQL queries are poorly written (aka...it searches an entire table for transactions within a certain date range, rather than searching in a logical order from most recent entry descending).

PayPal, what in the world are you doing to fix this?  It's 2014, not 1994.

[cgartists]

Generating monthly sales reports takes about 30-90 seconds.

Logging in with the new video page apart from almost freezing my computer at first makes typing password slow as well.

PayPal is the slowest website I use and I really would like to enjoy it more in future as they are not the cheapest so should work better.

[Hamish666]

I have just tried to load up my Paypal site and the gateway has timed out twice. This problem only started after they redesigned their web site. It is now a poor joke , especially if you are trying to run a business using Paypal.

[rk012]

There has been some kind of Ridiculous, and I do mean RIDICULOUS slowdown in paypal over the past few times I've used it (the past week and a half or so). Tried to print out some standard shipping invoices and all of a sudden they started taking minutes to load and print out, eventually the system spit out an error code saying to log back in at 11:00 pm pst. I've been trying to pay eBay fees via the pay fees through paypal link, the first click took something like 10 minutes (no joke) and it was still processing ... I figured the system was locking up or freezing so I just exited the page and reloaded, this time it took something like 5 minutes but the pay page finally loaded, clicked on the verify identity page and I've still been waiting, 20 minutes later!! This is unfrigging believable, I certainly hope my next months round of auctions don't take in the minutes to load (for each individual shipped item), when we're talking a dozen shipments or so .... that'll take over an hour just to print **bleep** shipping labels!! What the **bleep** is going on there!!!! Jesus just got this error code (copied & pasted it)    .... We're sorry. We encountered an issue processing your payment. Your payment was not processed and your account was not charged/debited. Please try again.    ... after 40 minutes wasted time just trying to pay seller fees!! ..... very frustrated right now & I need to back away from the computer before I start throwing things at it

[PayPal_paula]

Hi rk012,

I am sorry to hear of the issues you have been having. It sounds frustrating. Have you tried a different browser when using PayPal to see if this helps at all.

Please let us know

Paula

[jdominguez]

---

PayPal_paula wrote:

Hi rk012,

I am sorry to hear of the issues you have been having. It sounds frustrating. Have you tried a different browser when using PayPal to see if this helps at all.

Please let us know

Paula

---

I can assure you It has nothing to do with our connections, Paula.

The Paypal website has always been so slow, specially the transaction history. It takes about 10 seconds to load every page, so frustrating... It also lacks many features, such as searching by amount, but we are not talking about that now.

It's awful that such a big internet company like Paypal has such a lame page load times... but hey there are few realistic alternatives so I guess we'll have to live with it.

[YourDevsAreBad]

Hope to revive this one.  PayPal servers are still slow to this day in 2016.  I started using paypal in 2005 and still have not seen 1 bit of improvement in site load time.  That tells me they have not updated their servers since they have opened up for business.  The site still operates are the same speed with the same bugs.  

FIRE THE IT DEPARTMENT

[PayPal_Anna]

Hi YourDevsAreBad,

Thank you for posting!

I’m very sorry to hear about the situation.  

If you are experiencing challenges with PayPal website, I would recommend you clearing cash & cookies or changing the web browser to e.g. IE or FireFox and test it again.

If the website is loading with a delay, it would depend on your internet connection and the processing capacity of the device you use.

Hope that after applying the tips provided, your website will start loading as normal.

Anna

[Queequeg]

Paypal_Anna - Almost everyone here has indicated they have incredibly fast Internet connections and updated browsers, and for some reason y'all still try to pretend that there isn't something wrong with Paypal's coding, and that any speed issues must somehow be on the user's end.  This despite the fact that most of us can watch 60 FPS full HD video without a hitch...but a completely text based website somehow requires 30 seconds to load a page.

Paypal let the 'have to log in twice' error go on for months before addressing it, which indicates how few resources you devote to maintaining your site (in comparison to the amount of revenue it brings you).  The fact that this thread still exists, after 5 years, should indicate that perhaps instead of telling us to clear our caches and switch browsers, you might report the fact that a large percentage of the user population has issues with Paypal's load speeds during certain processes, and would like something done about it.