Run results for: Clone node vs create element

Run details:

User agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/75.0.3770.100 Safari/537.36

Browser: Chrome 75

Operating system: Windows

Device Platform: Desktop

Date tested: 5 years ago

Test name	Executions per second
Clone node	1159.2 Ops/sec
Create element	631.6 Ops/sec

Script Preparation code:

function createExample() {
  var el = document.createElement('div');
  el.className = 'class-1 class-2 class-3';
  el.id = 'example';
  el.textContent = 'Test';
  return el;
}

Tests:

Clone node
var clone = createExample(); var i = 1000; while (i--) { clone = clone.cloneNode(true); }
Create element
var el = createExample(); var i = 1000; while (i--) { el = createExample(); }

Run results for: Clone node vs create element

Compare cloning element vs creating a new one

Clone node

Create element