An interactive networking explainer

What Really Happens When You Visit a Website?

Every request you make travels through several hidden networking steps — caches, name servers, handshakes and a rendering engine — before a single pixel appears. Watch the whole journey, one stop at a time.

Type any domain. Nothing is ever looked up — the name is only used to personalize the walkthrough.

11
Networking stops
~120 ms
Typical total time
0
Real lookups performed