Speed Up Your Website with Fewer HTTP Requests

Websites are a huge stage for promoting and selling your products especially when you rely on an online platform for activities. It is also the platform that your customers engage with the most in an online shopping scenario. As one of the only official spots created by your business for your business, as Instagram and other social media platforms are accessible and used by everyone, it is essential to customize your website as much as possible to the needs of your customers. 

Whenever your site gets visitors, they request certain files to be able to access desired information on those files. Due to the enormous number of files that the browser has to request, the speed of your website can be affected, that is how quickly your page loads. The greater the number of HTTP requests, the more time your page would take to load and so generally when there are fewer HTTP requests, the site loads faster. It is extremely important to keep the time of your webpage loading to a minimum in order to not lose potential customers. A survey revealed that most customers exit the site, due to a lack of interest and patience, if the page takes more than three seconds to load.

Typically, the more complex a website is, the more HTTP requests it will need in order to render that page. Therefore, bigger sites usually load much slower than small ones do. Fortunately, there are many techniques that you can use to reduce the number of HTTP requests on your site and speed up your web pages. 

Websites usually load a lot of information. But often times those pages are missing many resources, thus only loading a subset of the pages that they actually need. These “resources” can be images, PDF files, or even just CSS and JavaScript files. Since they are not loaded into your pages, they take up valuable space on your hard drive and increase the size of each page you render. In addition to being unnecessary, these resources can also have a substantial impact on the time it takes to load your page once it has been requested.

There exist many more methods to refine your website to help it work faster. And so, we have put for you a few ways that would help you in increasing the loading speed and the improvement of your webpage. 

1. Eradicate media that may be unnecessary and do not add value

The most basic way to reduce the number of files on your site is to simply remove the ones that you do not need. For example, if you have a page with a background image and you do not want it as it does not add any value or is not what you desired, just remove it! 

Also take note that even though it looks like there is only one image on the page, there are actually two images. The second one is called “webp” and is not yet supported by every browser (for example Internet Explorer and Safari do support webp). The second one is not actually linked to by the CSS, but it is still downloaded by every browser that loads the page. Once you decide that you do not need a resource, just delete it! It is much faster for the browser to load and save bytes on your hard drive.

2. Image compression for size reduction

Even after getting rid of a considerable number of images, there are still many more images that would be there that are required. Removing them would degrade the quality of your webpage and so you should most definitely retain them. However, they still do they up lots of space and so it would be much easier and faster if the image size were reduced.

Image compression plugins like WP Smush plugin and EWWW optimizer can be used to reduce the size of the image while retaining the overall quality and fulfilling the purpose of its placement. 

Another method is to use images with .jpg format instead of .png as they are less complex and so take up less space. Reducing the image size can help increase your website loading speed and should definitely be considered while looking at areas for improvement.

3. The Lazy Loading technique

A page might have many pictures. At the point when a client visits that page, your site sends HTTP server demands for that multitude of pictures. Contingent upon how weighty your site page is, this might slow it down. 

However, imagine a scenario where the client never at any point expected to look down to the lower part of the page and see that multitude of pictures. The lazy loading procedure takes care of that issue. 

Rather than sending pointless HTTP demands, this procedure sends server demands when a client looks down at a picture on the page. Efficient and smart usage of assets with the lazy loading strategy can decrease the number of HTTP demands and further develop the loading pace of your site.

4. CSS and JavaScript files

Minification refers to removing code from CSS, JavaScript, and HTML files, which is unnecessary to execute — for example, unnecessary characters, white space, comments, etc. 

Consolidating CSS and JavaScript documents, very much like minification is additionally an incredibly decent method to decrease the absolute file size of your site. The thought is to combine all your CSS and JavaScript files into one separate document each. For instance, on the off chance that your site has four external JavaScript documents and three external CSS records, it will mean seven requests. In any case, in the event that you consolidate the 3 CSS records into one CSS document and the 4 JS documents into one JS document, your site will send just two requests rather than seven. Minifying and joining CSS and JavaScript records is a viable method for lessening the number of HTTP demands and speed up your site.

5. Content Delivery Network (CDN)

Content Delivery Network or CDN is yet another effective method to reduce the number of HTTP requests on your website. This is achieved by having servers located in various geographical locations, usually around the world, or depending on the operational area of the business. If your traffic is international, it is highly recommended to use CDN rather than when you have a majority of local traffic. 

A scenario can be imagined to accurately understand the operation of CDN. Suppose a customer from Hong Kong wishes to access your New York-based website, the HTTP requests would have to travel a long way and therefore would increase the loading time. Instead, your website can have servers set up in various locations so each server can cater to that specific location and increase efficiency and speed.

And so even if users from all over the world visit your website, a CDN will help operate your website and its features appropriately, as per desired.

To conclude, it is crucially important to understand the needs and requirements of your webpage, which is what customers expect it to have and therefore what it should include. Identifying the exact third-party integrations and external scripts that are slowing down your website and making appropriate changes, choosing fonts that do not use heavy resources in terms of processing power and bandwidth and more strategies can help you in the process.

Once you have identified the general requirements and features that definitely should be included, you can make a well-informed decision regarding which assets to keep and which to sacrifice to avoid heavy loading of the site and eventually slowing it down.