You don't know what you're talking about. Chris spotted the developer's unfamiliarity with the web and he was right. 200ms: http handshake done. let's downlo

You don't know what you're talking about. Chris spotted the developer's unfamiliarity with the web and he was right. 200ms: http handshake done. let's download this HTML page 207ms: ok the page is downloaded. let's see what it's all about 213ms: better look ahead and queue up all the files this page needs. it's a CSS file, a JS file and a bunch of PNGs 214ms: parses 9 lines. stops parsing. 217ms: CSS starts downloading! 220ms: JS starts downloading! 221ms: one of the PNGs starts downloading! nothing happens 384ms: CSS is done downloading :) 389ms: CSS is done parsing :) 405ms: the first PNG is done downloading :) At this point, I have loaded the all the HTML, CSS and even an image but not a single pixel will be drawn until the JS is done downloading and running. The problem here is not JavaScript, but render-blocking tags. This should be relevant: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/4396849/does-the-script-tag-position-in-html-affects-performance-of-the-webpage https://stackoverflow.com/questions/4396849/does-the-script-... Why can't the website just load everything and then, only after showing you the contents of the page, run the necessary JavaScript? Probably because the developer never even thought about all of this. I don't blame him. He's not walking around saying his website is fine handcrafted HTML free of bloat or fluff. He's just making a website about his book. As a sidenote, you believing that this is a website that "loads extremely quickly" reminds me of Jonathan Blows's "there's generalized insanity about software and people often don't know what makes programs slow" ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gWv_vUgbmug https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gWv_vUgbmug )