Moving between two pages without the flash
The white flash between two pages was used to sell heavy, costly sites. Browsers now avoid it on their own: a simple site can be just as smooth.
For ten years the same sentence was used to sell complex websites: “a classic site flashes when you change page, a web application does not”. It was true. Every navigation took everything down and put everything back up, and the eye saw the white between the two. To avoid it, the browser’s own navigation was replaced with a home-made mechanism, which intercepted every click, fetched the content and swapped a piece of the page.
That choice has a cost the client does not see at quote stage. A site built that way is heavier to load, longer to make and more delicate to change. The back button ends up going wrong somewhere, the link shared by email does not always open the right page, and every update of the mechanism needs a technician. All that to avoid a flash.
What the browser now does by itself
Recent browsers can now melt the old page into the new one, with a simple declaration in the site’s styling. The mechanism is called “view transitions”. They take a picture of the page being left, one of the page being opened, and move gently from one to the other. The flash disappears, navigation stays the one the visitor knows, and nothing is added to the weight of the site.
The default fade is enough in most cases. When an element is found on both pages, the logo for instance, the browser can be asked to keep it in place rather than fade it with the rest. One detail needs watching: two elements carrying the same name on the same page cancel the effect, which happens easily in a list of thumbnails.
One thing the browser does not do for us, and the most frequent fault: switching the effect off for people who asked for that in their device settings. A two-hundred-millisecond fade bothers nobody. A sideways slide applied to the whole page bothers many. On this site, all motion stops as soon as that setting is on.
And for those without the latest browser
The most widespread browsers have handled this fade since 2024, but not all of them. The degradation here is the best possible, and that is the decisive argument: a browser that does not know the declaration ignores it and navigates as it always did. Nothing to plan for, nothing to test twice, no fallback to build. The page does not lose a function, it loses a fade.
What this changes for a presentation site
The comfort of navigation was the last serious argument in favour of a complex site for content that is not complex. It has just fallen.
What remains are the genuine cases where an application is needed: a dashboard, an editor, a multi-step form that keeps its answers in memory. A magazine, a presentation site, a catalogue and documentation are not among them and never were. They went that way to avoid the flash. The same reasoning applies to appear-on-scroll effects, to how headlines break and to loading the next page before the click, which we leave out here for the opposite reason. For a client the consequence is direct: a simple site costs less to make, less to maintain, and no longer has anything to envy a complicated one in comfort. To judge for yourself, the titles in the catalogue already navigate this way, and the pricing page says what that simplicity costs.
Who writes these notes
This journal is kept by the workshop that designs and maintains the house’s websites. Everything described here, the Search Console, internal links, the business profile, is part of the work delivered with a site: if you would rather someone took care of it, that is precisely the trade.