Hacker News Reader

Comment by pratio | Hacker News Reader

I had never heard of them before but the website is incredibly fast, I know my internet connection didn't just improve. If anyone can shed some light on how they're doing it. Try navigating around and even change the website language. It is incredibly fast.

View on HN

Its a static site (Gatsby) hosted on Amazon CloudFront. Almost everything is inlined.

I'm seeing many json calls that return the content showed in the page.

It's json yes but not an api. They are serving json blobs from their cdn which are prefetched.

It's a good site, but nothing particularly clever going on.

JSON pre-fetched from a CDN sounds decently clever to me? If it’s making their website fast, that’s what matters.

Yes, I think the point of saying "nothing clever going on" is to indicate that everyone can and should be doing this. It doesn't take some kind of Steve Wozniak to accomplish.

I believe there is a healthy amount of cleverness available between “Nothing clever” and “Wozniak clever”, and I find it hard to agree with you.

Sure, but this doesn't really do any of that. If you just ship an inlined static site it will be this fast. You don't need any real "technologies" to do this. You just need leadership who will push back on the marketers/PMs who want to ship an entire petting zoo of third-party analytics trackers and A/B plugins.

If they’re using a framework to automate “inlining static sites”, and configuring it to be as fast as possible - I’d call that clever.

Adding analytics scripts or A/B testing is actually still possible, and not precluded by this method. If you prefer to do this manually to prove a point to your marketing team, go right ahead. But please don’t put down actual good work, just because you have high standards for what is “clever”.

It’s good, it’s not particularly clever but as another comment says, that doesn’t really matter. Everyone should be doing this. It doesn’t have to be json payloads. We do the same with lazy loaded react components which are served directly from our cdn as needed. Probably not quite as efficient given react overhead but the effect is similar.

If it's working well, does it have to be clever?

Reminds me of https://github.com/turbolinks/turbolinks

Do you have any explanation why it gets such a horrible Page Speed score on Google?

https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/?hl=s...

A few resources are slow to load

In addition to what other have said, the app begins fetching page data the moment you hover over a link, helping ensure the content is already present in memory when you actually decide to click.

The pop-up menus also have a very fast transition (compared to many websites) which aids in the feeling of snappiness. I don't know why so many sites insist on very slow transitions

I'm not sure what they are using but you can try the developer console and see that navigating to a new page costs only some "JSON" data. You can achieve the same with React, NextJS, or Gastby.

Not for me? Changing the language takes at least 5+ seconds, loading any sub pages is roughly as fast(slow) as anywhere else.

HN is generating a lot of traffic I guess?

Changed to German and it was within a second or two for me.

Whoa you are right - I thought they might be preloading the entire marketing site on page load but even loading the blogs is very quick.

It's a single-page application, the entire site and content is loaded on the first load.

I agree it's a single-page application, but while you are navigating content appears to be loaded just ahead of time. E.g. pop open some of the menus, then while you're thinking what to click, they appear to load the different pages that you can navigate to from that menu. They don't load the rendered pages, rather their content as "data", which the single-page application knows how to render.

Wow. That’s zippy. Anyone know any engineers there we can ask for an AMA?

I was thinking the same thing.

It looks like a rather default gatsby setup. Not much to AMA here.

The web is super fast if you just compile down to static, inclined content served from a CDN. Which is pretty close to gatsby defaults.

This is what websites were like in the 90s if you were on something faster than 56k.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com