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How is this Website so fast!?

Wes Bos · 2.4M views · 2024-10-18 · 13:39

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Overview

Wes Bos breaks down the techniques behind the McMaster-Carr website's speed: server-rendered HTML, prefetching, CDN and service worker caching, preloading, critical CSS and fixed-size images. He also notes its old-school jQuery and YUI JavaScript.

On Hacker News

HN points to it as the clearest frontend explanation of why McMaster-Carr feels so snappy, often contrasted with slow modern UIs.

Recommended by 4 HN people across 4 months · HN mentions 2024–2025

Topics

Web developmentSoftware performance & optimization
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page speedprefetchingcachingservice workersmcmaster-carrfrontend

What people said

0xTJ · 2025-08 · Recommendation

As an interesting example of the opposite UI experience, this video goes into why the McMaster-Carr website is so incredibly snappy to use: [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.

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_nivlac_ · 2025-07 · Recommendation

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: [VIDEO]

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CleanCoder · 2025-05 · Recommendation

The low lag part is especially impressive. Here is Wes Bos taking a deeper dive into the intricacies of technologies used to accomplish this: [VIDEO]

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Sources

Video by Wes Bos, played through YouTube.

Data and selection notes

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HN Library: HackerTube export (2026-10-31) and open-index/hacker-news. Upstream summaries and classifications may contain AI errors.

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