[perl4ever]

Is there any necessary connection between visual roughness or a "90s look" and low bandwidth or speed? Seems to me you can have a lot of javascript and CSS in a few KB, and what bogs down modern web pages has to be frameworks and advertising. Although I'm not and never have been a web dev.

[rakoo]

For sure you can have a slick website with javascript and CSS that doesn't slow down the page because of all the tricks like loading/caching/prerending/whatever magic is available. But that's the thing: it requires work, which means you have to be very good at it, or select the correct tools to do it and depend on them; in the case of companies website, you most likely are pressured to cram yet another feature that is extremely urgent yet there's no budget for making the site fast. Sometimes developers don't even care because it's fast enough to them. Some other times they do care, and they come up with excellent initiatives like 2G Tuesdays (https://engineering.fb.com/networking-traffic/building-for-e...)

So yeah, doing a 90s' style website is not necessary to have a fast website, but it's impossible to have a slow website. But it's true that a very minimum amount of CSS can totally change the look of your site without being bloated: see for example the Best Motherfucking Website (https://bestmotherfucking.website/)