How is this Website so fast!?
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.
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.
Recommended by 4 HN commenters across 4 different months, 2024 to 2025.
What Hacker News said
Recommends yread · 2024-10 · on “how come a company founded over 100 years ago has the fastest site”
To save you a click: apparently [LINK] is very fast. A person who worked there chimes in [LINK] saying they focused on speed (competing with paper catalogue), used VB.net and SQL Server with stored procs. Some other guy explains [LINK] : · Agressive pre-loading pages on hover · fixed image dimensions - there is no layout shift when they load · Dependency Injection (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 expl
Recommends CleanCoder · 2025-05 · 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: [this video]
Recommends _nivlac_ · 2025-07 · 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: [this video]
Recommends 0xTJ · 2025-08 · 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: [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.
Cites WillAdams · 2025-05 · on “Ask HN: What are good high-information density UIs (screenshots, apps, sites)?”
There is (was?) an absolutely fabulous answer on quora.com which detailed how this site came to be --- from memory: - initial ecommerce site was a mess (basically a page-by-page recreation of the catalog?) which saw minimal usage - the redesign, which focused on usability --- notably reduced cognitive load --- resulted in an immediate uptick in orders which grew markedly for a long while until it represented the vast majority of their business EDIT: and also optimized for repeat orders on a 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