Two weeks ago, I was in a deep rabbit pit. One of our biggest clients has a serious complaint again, that our site was loading slowly in certain regions. India was one among them. I had already run Lighthouse reports, optimized image delivery, moved some assets from regional servers to a CDN, and reduced third-party scripts. Still, load times in Mumbai looked sluggish.

So, I did what any curious CTO would do: I started checking popular high-traffic websites in India to see how they handled performance, including news sites, government portals, and e-commerce sites. And then I suddenly stumbled on the category I hadn’t thought about in a while: Indian matrimony sites.
Shaadi.com, Bharatmatrimony, Jeevansaathi.com, Tamilmatrimony, etc.

I figured I’d check how fast their pages loaded and what tech stacks they were using. But thirty minutes later, I was still clicking. Not because of their performance, which was surprisingly snappy in some cases, but because the entire design of these sites was unconventional. Pop-ups, blinking banners, auto-playing videos, sidebars filled with castes, subcastes, even dietary preferences.

One site had a filter labeled “No Onion, No Garlic.” Another had profiles sorted by community, horoscope match, and monthly salary in rupees. I was fascinated. Not just by the content, but by the unapologetic specificity. In my world, we fight over whether asking for a birth year in a signup form is “too much friction.” These sites had drop-down menus for options such as “Mother Tongue: Telugu (Rayalaseema)” and “Manglik: Yes/No/Don’t Know.”

Somewhere between inspecting page load waterfalls and decoding horoscope compatibility, I realised that these sites weren’t built for performance perfection. They were built for cultural precision. For the emotional trust they provide. For the parents browsing on behalf of their kids. And guess what? They’re profitable.

I eventually closed the tabs and returned to tracking my performance logs, then shipped some fixes. But those tabs stuck with me. It reminded me of how not all users’ needs are universal. What looks cluttered to one person might be complete to another. What I optimize for speed, simplicity, and elegance isn’t always the point.

Sometimes the proper UX is knowing exactly what caste someone belongs to, whether they cook meat at home, and if they own a house in Coimbatore.