The website is fast because it's minimal, just under 80 kB of which 55 is the custom font; this is fine for plain content sites, but others will have other requirements.

There's never a reason to make a content website use heavyweight JS or CSS though.

That’s actually why I don’t like discourse at all. If your community site needs loading icons I don’t want to use it.

is it a hand coded website in this day and age?!