My favorite website

By Garrett Mickley •  Updated: 01/07/24 •  2 min read

My favorite website is the Berkshire Hathaway website.

It has nothing to do with the company itself.

I invest in stocks because I feel like I have to if I want to retire.

I actually believe that shareholder value is a myth and that it’s actually bad for our economy.

The reason BerkshireHathaway.com is my favorite website is because it’s built in pure HTML.

It remains largely unchanged since 1997, which is the oldest Wayback Machine goes.

Seriously, go to https://berkshirehathaway.com/ and hit F12 on your keyboard (you might have to hold down the Fn key).

You’ll see your browsers inspector pop out.

You can see that https://berkshirehathaway.com/ doesn’t even have modern HTML 5.

It’s still built with tables.

A single Berkshire Hathaway stock (Class A) is worth half a million dollars.

Their entire stock portfolio is worth about $351 Billion.

That’s $351,000,000,000.

That’s enough money to buy everyone on the planet a hamburger.

Every day.

For a month.

But their website design hasn’t changed in almost 30 years.

Their website technology hasn’t changed in almost 30 years.

That’s awesome.

The site load speed is 116 ms with a page size of 198.1 kb.

For comparison, my website at the time of writing loads in 2.14 seconds with a page size of 2.8 mb.

And I’m not worth anywhere near $351 Billion.

The carbon footprint of BerkshireHathaway.com is rated A+, cleaner than 95% of websites, according to Website Carbon Calculator.

Again, for comparison, mine is a B, above 64% of websites.

This has inspired me to leave WordPress and build my website to be much lighter.

In 2025, GarrettMickley.com will join the SmolWeb.

If I can, I’ll have it running on a solar-powered server, too.

Until then follow my RSS feed or register for my email newsletter:

Garrett Mickley

I've been working in digital marketing for a decade and a half, and I'm ready for a career change. This blog is my journal.

Keep Reading