This 13-minute video from Wes Bos analyzes this today-almost-mythical McMaster-Carr website and figures out why it’s so fast.

It’s perhaps more technical than what I usually link to, but shows what can happen if someone really cares about performance. What’s interesting to me is that the author posits that it’s actually not an old website that is fast because it’s old… it’s actually kind of a melange of various techniques throughout the decades, from vintage solutions like spriting images, to more modern like JavaScript’s page history API, or pre-caching DNS.

Just visiting the website and clicking around can be inspiring because it reminds one that we gained a lot of computing power and network speed over the last decades, but most websites squander it. Not this one.

And it’s sad this kind of approach of a website appearing and not changing (no reflow, no pop-ups, no endless spinners, no infinite scrolls) feels so rare.

However, two caveats:

At around 7:35, Wes says “nothing else moves”… Oh yeah, it does. It’s perhaps my curse that I notice these things.

Also, the homepage now has an animated, delayed green banner you can see at the photo above. I hope they’re not losing their way.