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How is this Website so fast!?

Wes Bos

220K subscribers • 3 videos on Hallway

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  • Recommended by 5 people: 4 on Hacker News and 1 on Lobsters.
  • Presented by Wes Bos, web developer and educator

Intermediate. Assumes working knowledge.

2.4M views2 years ago5 recommendations

Web developmentSystems programmingWeb performanceHow browsers workJavaScript

Wes Bos analyzes the McMaster-Carr website to explain the frontend performance techniques, caching strategies, and architectural choices that make it incredibly fast.

Breaking down the McMaster Carr website and the techniques they use to make it so dang fast. - Intro - Server Rendered HTML - Prefetching HTML - CDN Caching - Client Caching with Service Worker - Preloading Assets - Critical CSS - LCP - Fixed Size Images - JavaScript - jQuery and YUI - Slow Pages - Wrap Up

Why it's here

5 people recommend this

What people say. Recommended as an excellent breakdown of real-world web performance techniques and how a highly optimized, low-latency user interface is built.

agent281on Lobsters • Recommends

How is this website so fast?
61View on Lobsters

yreadon Hacker News • Recommends

On “how come a company founded over 100 years ago has the fastest site”

…ction (huh?) - only loading the JS needed on the pages where its needed · Uses pushstate to change pages so it feels faster than a full reload · agressive CDN and browser caching · Server rendered HTML (ASP .net) Funny enough they load almost a meg of JS (YUI and jQuery) but you dont notice because it feels so snappy He made a video explaining it: link to this video which is a lot more interesting than the inane tweet. Maybe we could replace the link with the video?…
View on Hacker News

CleanCoderon Hacker News • Recommends

On “Ask HN: What are good high-information density UIs (screenshots, apps, sites)?”

The low lag part is especially impressive. Here is Wes Bos taking a deeper dive into the intricacies of technologies used to accomplish this: link to this video
View on Hacker News

_nivlac_on Hacker News • Recommends

On “A 14kb page can load much faster than a 15kb page (2022)”

I am SO glad jofzar posted this - I remember this website but couldn't recall the company name. Here's a good video on how the site is so fast, from a frontend perspective: link to this video
View on Hacker News

0xTJon Hacker News • Recommends

On “Why is GitHub UI getting slower?”

As an interesting example of the opposite UI experience, this video goes into why the McMaster-Carr website is so incredibly snappy to use: link to this video . It's different from GitHub in many ways (no user-generated content, day-by-day mostly static pages), but it's interesting to see how good a browsing experience can be. It makes sense given that their value as a company depends so much on making it quick and easy to find exactly what you need.
View on Hacker News

u/__ihavenoname__in r/dotnet • Mentions

McMaster Carr website uses asp.net webforms (.aspx) and jQuery but the website is blazingly fast, whats your opinion on this? I recently got this video recommended on my YouTube feed and I was surprised to see that McMaster carr website was built with asp.net framework webforms, the website may not look "sexy" for modern standards but it gets the job done and loads blazingly fast, what's your opinion on this? The engineers definitely built this website with performance in mind but they didn't use modern frameworks or tools to achieve this but rather decided to stick with webforms and optimize it. What can we learn from this?
132View on Reddit

WillAdamson Hacker News • Mentions

On “Ask HN: What are good high-information density UIs (screenshots, apps, sites)?”

…schedule If someone could find that, or a better writeup, I'd be grateful (it's _not_ the Medium.com article) and this page: link is just a mentioning by the company which did the underpinnings, not the overall architect. This link is decent: link There was of course previous discussion of this here: link Video on why the site loads so fast: link to this video (which is from the Medium.com article)…
View on Hacker News

u/ChapterIllustrious81in r/Frontend • Mentions

On “What's the point of server side rendering?”

If you want to understand Server side rendering, you can have a look a this video where someone looks at the McMaster Carr website and why it is so fast. [video
2View on Reddit