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Easy, you just had to dial up first. Took about 30 seconds, IIRC. It was automated, in that your dialup client had the gateway phone number and user credentials stored. You literally just had to click 'connect' and let it do its thing. ISDN worked the same way as modem in this regard, even if the underlying tech was very different, topologically speaking.

Once you were on, it was easier in many respects, as everyone had to take bandwidth constraints into account: There weren't a billion asynchronous Javascript calls happening in the background, and cookies weren't used for everything.

Websites were rarely more than a few kilobytes in size, resulting in pageloads happening just as fast if not faster than today, except from the pictures (which took a little longer). Pictures were scaled to accommodate modemers - websites that didn't never got much of an audience.