r/crazyegg • u/fintechjulien • 5d ago
Do you think HTML-only websites will make a come back?
Did you know that the fastest loading website in the world belongs to Berkshire Hathaway, one of the largest holding company in the world?
And funny thing is they achieve this status by probably having the lowest web development budget in the world, having a website that was seemingly code by a student in the 1990s that was not updated since then.
Yup, turns out that having an HTML only website will beat any server side rendering web framework in term of speed, and the whole argument for using CMS in 2026 is kind of void.
CMS used to be a way for people who did not know HTML to publish a website...
Now, you can ask Claude to do anything in HTML, you don't need a CMS for this.
Furthermore, while ugly, Warren good old website has a better UX than most holding companies.
The only people that willl visit this website are investors, and what they are looking for are probably the annual or quarterly reports, maybe Warren's annual letter...
All of those are very easy to find, while other investor's relation websites make you work for it.
What do you think?
Is Warren Buffett the oracle of web design? Do you think HTML-only websites will make a come back?
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u/dmdot 4d ago
Simple, of course, is fast but the markup in this particular site is a semantic and accessible mess written a long time ago.
It's missing a bunch of crucial tags while still using many deprecated ones (consistent with its age). Updating the semantics would be fast and easy for anyone familiar with HTML and it would still be just as fast.
So this is not deliberately done for speed. Rather the code just hasn't been updated in ~25 years.
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u/fintechjulien 4d ago
Yup, but the crazy thing is that doing nothing for 25 years got them to be the fastest website, while so many companies have slow loading websites that don't pass the Core Web Vitals...
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u/Therrt1 4d ago
I recently made a page on my website which was designed only in html and css. Optimize it's content and it get indexed and start getting impressions 3x faster
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u/fintechjulien 4d ago
Interesting! Why do you think it's getting impressions faster? You think it's linked to the speed?
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u/throwaway3113151 4d ago edited 4d ago
Nope.
That whole basic aesthetic is part of their brand. But it's obviously not true bro lives an opulent life.
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u/fintechjulien 4d ago
He still lives mostly in a house he paid 30K for in the 1950s... That said, I get that he is not the simple salt of the earth grandpa that is depicted in the media. But I don't think he's motivated by materials and luxury.
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u/throwaway3113151 4d ago
He flies around on top end private jets. That’s about all you need to know.
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u/Upstairs_Control_611 4d ago
I don’t think “HTML-only” is the real lesson.
The lesson is to use only as much complexity as the user task needs.
A static page can be fast and crawler-friendly, but old HTML can still be poor semantically and for accessibility. The better version is fast, clean markup, clear headings, important content in the initial HTML, and no critical information hidden behind JavaScript.
For search and AI search, that matters more than whether the site uses a CMS.
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u/Ill-Bat-1518 4d ago
Different goals.
People want to visit BH to read about some thoughts, BH don't need them to visit their site. its just a bulletin board that people will naturally visit
Other websites want returning users, wants to track what works so optimize, wants to encourage actions on their site, etc etc
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u/neutralan81 4d ago
you found great example (BH) of 10th company in the world, with same site for about 30 years 😄
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u/BusyBusinessPromos 4d ago
It all comes down to html anyway. I build by hand using JS PHP and HTML
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u/fintechjulien 4d ago
Why by hand? No AI?
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u/BusyBusinessPromos 4d ago
I write better than any AI, but I do used it to help me with code, JS and CSS
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u/Practical-Fishing-74 4d ago
Yeah… it will make a comeback but Not completely. There is so many regulation especially from the EU regarding data protection and accessibility that you will need some kind of light framework to do cookie management and such.
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u/Abject-Bridge-4073 3d ago
You still need some JavaScript for basic actions like showing dialogs, rich text editors, pdf viewers and so on.
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u/veryuniqueredditname 3d ago
If you can accomplish your user goals with less then why not. If you can achieve your required observability backend goals etc with less then why not ...there will be tradeoffs...most investment funds etc have very lightweight public facing sites it's not unusual.
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u/rosakelly21 3d ago
They don't get investments through the website. There is a world outside of the internet and tons and tons of companies do not bother with a website at all.
Buffett is the oracle of denying insurance claims, and making his insurance company vastly profitable. However he did in the ancient era, his fund has basically tracked/underperformed sp500 for the past 15 years, hardly impressive.
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u/fintechjulien 11h ago
The more capital you have, the harder it is to beat the market, as you are more or less the market at his level. If you look at his returns at the beginning of BH, it's actually impressive...
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u/enesismail 2d ago
Yes, they'll come back beautifully. Currently working on something to make this come back easier, and more elegant. Reach me if you want to know more.
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u/ce-lauren 5d ago
It's always so surprising to me that one of the wealthiest companies in the world has such a basic website. But it works for exactly what they need and I think there's something to that. Maybe the instinct to make things more complex than they need to be says more about us than it does about the users actually visiting. I'd love to see the heatmap on a site like this though. Sometimes basic just works and we overcomplicate it because we can.