How the browser renders a web page

My thinking: if I’m going to build websites that are fast and reliable, I need to really understand the mechanics of each step a browser goes through to render a web page, so that each can be considered and optimised during development. This post is a summary of my learnings of the end-to-end process at a fairly high level.

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A lot of this is based on the fantastic (and FREE!) Website Performance Optimization course by Ilya Grigorik and Cameron Pittman on Udacity. I’d highly recommend checking it out.

Also very helpful was the article How Browsers Work: Behind the scenes of modern web browsers by Paul Irish and Tali Garsiel. It’s from 2011 but many of the fundamentals of how browsers work remain relevant at the time of writing this blog post.

Ok, here we go. The process can be broken down into these main stages:

1. Start to parse the HTML
2. Fetch external resources
3. Parse the CSS and build the CSSOM
4. Execute the JavaScript
5. Merge DOM and CSSOM to construct the render tree
6. Calculate layout and paint

Source: How the browser renders a web page – DEV