The Journey of a Website: From URL to Render

When you type a URL into your web browser’s address bar, you’re initiating a complex process that culminates in the display of a website. In this article, we’ll dive into how a website is displayed in a browser, starting from the point where the user enters the URL to the moment the page is fully loaded and rendered.

The website display process can be broken down into several stages, including:

1. Domain name resolution
2. Establishing a connection to the server
3. Requesting and receiving the HTML file
4. Parsing HTML and building the Document Object Model (DOM)
5. Fetching and parsing external assets (CSS, images, and JavaScript)
6. Rendering the content (Layout, Painting and Compositing)

Let’s examine each of these steps in detail.

1. Domain name resolution

When you type a URL into the address bar, the browser first needs to translate the domain name (e.g., google.com) into an IP address. This process is called domain name…