Hot take: Geocities sites actually worked better than modern web builders

I keep seeing people post links to old Geocities pages like they're just cute relics, but nobody talks about how those sites loaded instantly and had zero bloat. I pulled up a 1998 fan page for The X-Files last week and it loaded in under 2 seconds on my phone, while my current Squarespace site takes 8 seconds to load a single image. Anyone else notice how we traded speed for flashy gimmicks?

2 comments

2 Comments

christopher_singh929d ago

Spent an hour last week trying to figure out why my "modern" site was buffering a 3MB hero image when my old Angelfire page from 2000 loaded my animated dancing hamster gif in half a second. Pretty sure my current website is held together by 47 tracking scripts and a prayer. Meanwhile those old Geocities pages were basically a Notepad file with a star field background and they worked flawlessly. My eyes might bleed looking at those neon text on black backgrounds now but at least they loaded before I forgot what I was looking for.

blake_martinez9d ago

Bet you nobody's talking about how those old sites didn't have to deal with ad blockers breaking everything. Like my Geocities page just had a banner ad at the top from some random affiliate program and that was it. Now my site has to try and load a million different ad networks and analytics tools all fighting each other while also trying to show content. I swear half the load time on modern sites is just the browser trying to figure out which scripts to block or run. At least with the old school setup you knew exactly what you were getting. Maybe it's just me but feels like we optimized for features and forgot about actually delivering a working page.