hackertube.io

How is this Website so fast!?

Wes Bos · explainer · Watch on YouTube

Web developmentSoftware performance & optimization

What it is

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.

Why Hacker News recommends it

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

  • 4 people recommended it
  • 4 different months
  • 0 strong recommendations
  • first 2024, last 2025

What HN commenters said

  1. “which is a lot more interesting than the inane tweet”

    Explains why the McMaster-Carr site is so fast

    yread, 2024-10 · Recommendation · in “how come a company founded over 100 years ago has the fastest site”

  2. “Here is Wes Bos taking a deeper dive into the intricacies of technologies used to accomplish this”

    Deeper dive into the technologies behind the site's speed

    CleanCoder, 2025-05 · Recommendation · in “Ask HN: What are good high-information density UIs (screenshots, apps, sites)?”

  3. “Here's a good video on how the site is so fast, from a frontend perspective”

    Frontend view of how the site is so fast

    _nivlac_, 2025-07 · Recommendation · in “A 14kb page can load much faster than a 15kb page (2022)”

  4. “this video goes into why the McMaster-Carr website is so incredibly snappy to use”

    Why McMaster-Carr is snappy, contrasted with slow GitHub UI

    0xTJ, 2025-08 · Recommendation · in “Why is GitHub UI getting slower?”

Excerpts from Hacker News comments, linked to the originals. Summaries and labels were written by a language model from those comments.

Topics: page speed, prefetching, caching, service workers, mcmaster-carr, frontend

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