The McMaster-Carrification effect
Improving this site with tweaks inspired by McMaster-Carr.
This awesome tweet from Kenneth Cassel went viral last week, covering the very cool McMaster-Carr website, mcmaster.com.
It’s super fast. Wes Bos has a great vid covering some of the specifics of how it works.
I have a strange obsession with perf on this blog. Hence, the McMaster-Carrification effect. I grabbed some implementation details that I particularly liked from the site, focused on reflow and time to contentful paint. Here’s a few things I implemented:
- Inlined all SVG for the nav icons. I mentioned using the Lucide CDN for my nav icons - that was a quick, easy way to integrate. But while loading those icons from the CDN, the img tags are blank. Instead, I inlined the SVG tags directly into the nav. No external load needed.
- Set width, height, constraints for images. I actually quite like the look of McMaster’s images - they’re hard-coded at certain width/heights, and they have a border wrapping them inside the layout. All images are now constrained to a consistent width, which reduces layout shift as they load.
- Beginning to investigate preloading. All the external hostnames used on mcmaster.com are preloaded, using
dns-preload. I should be able to implement this for a few of the JS and font dependencies.
Perf chasing is fun! If this was a real product, and not a silly blog, it wouldn’t make a ton of sense to invest heavily here. PMF is more important. But when it’s a few blog posts a month, chasing an extra 100ms in render time is a fun way to spend the time.