So I saw a youtube video where the youtuber analyse a website which is lightening fast. So I looked it myself
Here is what I found
McMaster carr is the website (Just search it up you will find it). At first the website looks pale and outdated. But once you start to use it you get surprise after surprise.
The initial page reloads in a blink which images. But how you may ask? Of course CDN is there but eveyone has them what they did differently is making the images a sprite then each placeholder is of fixed height and width 600x600. That’s a aha moment to find out because the sprite things is way old of a technique.
Some of the technique they used is when you hover on a image they prefetch the page that means the page gets loaded even before route change. Also they don’t load all js just the page which needed the js using some tree pattern to keep track
Also they use yui a 2008 ui for design. The code is probably written in <a href="http://asp.net" target="_blank" rel="noopener nofollow">asp.net</a> and react but the techniques they used are native and will go with any framework
They even take interviews of their regular user to improve their UX. And I wanted to buy something and the UX is soo good it just takes me there and I don’t even own a car.
Another note the lighthouse score for the site it 66. Now as I have used the site I know lighthouse score does mean anything for me now this site should be scored 110 or so because one of my website has 93 score which maybe 2/3x slower than McMaster.
So remember people simplicity and performance is key to engineering

Zubair Ahmed Rafi

McMaster-Carr's website demonstrates that performance doesn't require modern frameworks. Despite its outdated appearance, the site achieves exceptional speed through techniques like image sprites, hover-based prefetching, selective JavaScript loading, and CDN optimization. The author argues that simplicity and performance matter more than Lighthouse scores, noting how the site's superior user experience contradicts its modest score of 66.

The fastest website that does not use your framework

I 100% guarantee you they’re not using React. And it’s not magic, this is just how we used to do things in 2012.
Or rather, how web performance obsessed devs were doing things in 2012. Most web devs admittedly were running hodgepodges of unmaintainable awfulness (tell me with a straight face that that’s changed, I dare you), but some of were religiously running YSlow and PageSpeed before every change, and reading every word that came out from Steve Souders &amp; Ilya Grigorik, and hand-reversing Facebook’s and Google’s minified JavaScripts to learn from their tricks.
What McMaster-Carr is doing is pretty much following best performance practices and staying lean, and then adding a few ‘cheats’ like prefetching (which we were also doing in 2012, we just had to get under the hood with stuff like cross browser XHR and JSONP since none of the modern browser standards existed yet).
It’s a great example of a server-rendered MPA with a HATEOAS mindset and a tactical sprinkle of JavaScript. It’s what 90% of React monstrosities should have been, and could have been.
/Sorry, rant over.

Yes… I saw the website. Its so fast. The only problem is its not responsive

I see that website is written in React
<img src="https://media.daily.dev/image/upload/s--S5QiyhuV--/f_auto/v1758601164/ugc/content_5951db16-e0d2-4e7c-b82f-c3da7958f1aa?_a=BAMAK+ZW0" alt="image">

they are definitely not using react lol, its pretty easy to inspect the source code and see exactly how they are likely doing things. react also didnt exist until 2013, if they use any ui framework at all, its jquery

Seeing the title reminded me of this video too. I think author refers this video: <a href="http://youtube.com/watch?v=-Ln-8QM8KhQ" target="_blank" rel="noopener nofollow">youtube.com/watch?v=-Ln-8QM8KhQ</a>