When should a website use WebGL — and when not?
Laboe Studio
Direct answer: Only where motion carries meaning the copy cannot. Content pages stay HTML.
WebGL earns its place when a page has one thing to explain from several angles — a space, an object, a system — and the motion itself is the explanation. It costs a large script bundle, GPU time and a harder accessibility story, so it should never stand between a visitor and the words they came for.
From our work
This site is the example. The home page runs one persistent WebGL stage; every service, work and insights page is plain HTML with one-shot motion. Phones never load the 3D bundle at all — on our production build, shipping three.js to mobile measured Lighthouse 70 with 1.1 seconds of blocking time, so phones get a CSS field instead. Soul Youth, a B2B brand site whose visitors come to read specifications, has no WebGL anywhere.
When this matters: Reach for it on a brand launch or a product story with one hero object. Leave it out of any page whose job is to be read, compared or crawled.
Related: Development