On April 8 MDN unpacked the new frontend their readers got in August 2025: architecture, search, and the honest tradeoffs of dragging a twenty-year-old docs site into the present.
Three choices worth noting
- Search as a first-class product, not a widget: it drove most of the rebuild's value.
- Server-rendered HTML for content, light interactivity only where docs need it.
- Named numbers instead of one global claim: what got faster, on which surface, with what caveat.
The deepest lesson travels beyond MDN: on a big content site, the search box is the product. Build it like the homepage. This site's tiny search page is built on the same instinct: plain static HTML with a client-side index, hydrating only after first paint.