Building the Web in Islands, Not Mountains

June 30, 2025

Illustration of four green islands in a calm blue ocean with a large mountain and clouds in the background

Not every site needs to be a full-blown app. In fact, most don’t. What they need is to be fast, focused, and respectful of the user’s device.

Put another way: if your ‘About Us’ page needs 300kB of JavaScript to render a sentence about your mission, it may be time to reconsider.

Source: Building the Web in Islands, Not Mountains — Den Odell

We’ve become fixated on monolithic patterns like SPA for all web content, when perhaps different approaches make sense in different contexts. Here Den Odell explains the Islands pattern and when it might be best deployed.