Design Your Website For Speed - Reduce the HTTP Requests

Website speed affects your visitors experience to your website. If your visitor has to wait too long to see what he has come to see, you will feel the results.

There are a few tricks to optimizing speed.

Let’s look at an obvious one:

How It Works

When someone goes to your website for the first time, every object on the page they visit will be sent from your server to the user’s computer.

On future visits their computer will need to make a round trip to your server to identify everything that was not stored on their computer during the previous visits.

The web browser stores some files on your PC and will only download these again when you have told it to do so.

There Are Options

Some download options for your web browser are:

* every visit,
* every time I restart my browser,
* daily,
* NEVER.

“Never” Option

If you select the “Never” option you will only ever see one version of the webpage, locked in time. The time being the first time you visited that page.

Your computer will download a page and every single time you go back it will look the same, no matter how many changes have been done.

That page will not be updated on your computer.

“Every Visit” Option

If the user selects the option “every visit”, this will delay the response time of your site. The computer will check to see if the most recent page is loaded. This is referred to as the HTTP requests.

If your site is loading dozens of objects, images and files this delay can add up to several seconds.

Gain Speed

When you decide to design your site for speed, one of the best ways to do this is to reduce the amount of HTTP requests that are being sent to your server.

Reduce The HTTP Requests

So, how can you reduce the number of HTTP requests?

* Get rid of unnecessary things to load
* Combining files
* A better use of file and image naming

This can help you speed the server response time for your clients. And they will appreciate you for it, even if they don’t realize it.

First Step

The first thing to do to speed up the response time for HTTP requests is to have fewer objects on your website.

Get rid of unnecessary images, headers, styling features and whatever else you already have.

Since the user has downloaded certain files to their computer; reuse them.

Unless you really need to have a different header image on every page, stick with one and call it image1.

Don’t have identical images numbered image1, image2, image3 and so on.

This may help with some odd static, but most users would be happier to have a site that is fast.

Second Step

If you have 2 images side by side, combine 2 then into a single image. This is a simple thing to do when this is an option.

Third Step

After images you have external files.

Make sure that your requests for external files or scripts are combined in a single location.

For example instead of using three CSS files to create the layout of your page:

<link rel=”stylesheet” type=”text/css” href=”/body.css” />
<link rel=”stylesheet” type=”text/css” href=”/side.css” />
<link rel=”stylesheet” type=”text/css” href=”/footer.css” />

You should use a single one with all the styling information:

<link rel=”stylesheet” type=”text/css” href=”/style.css” />

There are times and circumstances when you would want 3 files.

But do not make 3 files just for the sake of keeping things apart.

Design Your Website For Speed

Keep an eye on the number of HTTP requests your visitors need in order to see your website.

Do you want to design your website for speed?

Do you want to know what you should do to make things move faster is?

One of the things is to reduce the amount of HTTP requests that are being sent to your server.


This articles is part of the Design Your Website For Speed series.

Speed is an important consideration for international internet marketing. The other articles in this series are:

Design Your Website For Speed - Use The Height And Width Tags

Design Your Website For Speed – Use A Forward Slash On Your Links

Design Your Website For Speed - Optimize Your Cascading Style Sheets