How To Make Fewer HTTP Requests In WordPress

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Keith Rainz

Learn how you can minimize HTTP requests on your WordPress site to increase your website performance and speed

Need fewer HTTP requests on your WordPress site?

This basically means you need to reduce the number of loading items (requests) at your platform. There’s a whole lot of technological things going on behind the scenes every time you visit a web site. When words and photos are loaded into your computer, your browser requests for and receives files in the background.

Such HTTP requests load speeds on the effect page and eventually affect user interface, bounce rate and SEO. The less HTTP requests that the application sends to the server, the quicker it loads.

What is an HTTP submission, then, and what would you do to the it? Let’s look at how the server requests work, tools to help determine exactly how many HTTP requests your site sends, and tips on how to reduce requests from your site and make it faster.

What are WordPress HTTP Requests?

Each time anyone views a page on your blog, their client pings your web server and asks for the files containing the page’s content. Such files may include files such as Xml, CSS and JavaScript, images, icons and other files.

The submission is called a file for HTTP. HTTP stands for the Hypertext Transfer Protocol, which essentially the browser name that receives a request for a file, and the server that transfers the message to the user.

If the server receives an HTTP request from a user’s client, the server can respond by submitting the files you need. The client then returns the page to the user.

Why are HTTP requests so critical to keep track of? Since their client has to make a different HTTP request for any single file used to create the website they are viewing each time anyone visits your site. When you have a lightweight platform that doesn’t have many files, the search and uploading of your files won’t take long. But for most websites this is not the case, especially those that use tons of images, animations and other dynamic content.

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Through reducing the amount of items on the pages on your site, you can reduce the number on HTTP requests needed to make a web page. This, in effect, will help the site speed up load times.

But first, you need to ask how many requests your domain makes to HTTP. Nothing is more important than the user experience. That’s what encourages people to subscribe to your blog, purchase your goods or find out more about your services.

Anything that undermines the experience — even if it’s just a web page the takes a couple of seconds too long to load — can put your conversion rate at risk. It is then the duty of your website to submit each and every file on which your website includes. That includes text, photos (which is typically what most files are), video embeds, CSS and JavaScript files, and also Gravatar images that show in feeds to your comments. And each file gets a separate request to the server.

After all the application requests are received and files passed to the browser, the website can then be displayed on the screens of your guests. But if your WordPress site has tens or even hundreds of files that you can upload to the browsers of your users, what do you think is the load time page?

Nothing good, nothing good.

So this gets even worse because the platform is rising in popularity so generating requests for HTTPS servers at the same time. Case in point: 40 per cent of users lose patience with a website if they have to wait for a page to load for longer than three seconds. Kissmetrics also estimates that a one-second delay in a page response when a tourist participates in conversions will cost up to 7 per cent.

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And, if you want to maintain those load times peppy, you need to find a way to cut back on how many files need to be downloaded to a server.

The solution then is not to use less images or complex materials, or to go with the template so minimally that it is extremely dull. Although the size of files and the quantity of files are significant, WordPress offers ways to get around that.

How to check WordPress HTTP requests

If you’re a Chrome user, you can use Developer Tools on your browser seeing how many HTTP requests your site makes every time it loads.

To do, right-click the page you want to review on your account, and then press the “Inspect” button.

The Network panel will show the network operation of your Web page. Refresh the screen with the panel open and you can see the HTTP requests as they happen in real time and see what happens as the load loads. Luckily, there is no need to play this guessing game here. It’s not like your visitors see the white death screen and you don’t have any idea what caused it. There are a range of resources to help you monitor the cause of lag time in loading times for your web.

To check WordPress site requests you can use GTMETRICS

To conclude…

There are so many things you can do to reduce HTTP requests in WordPress, those above are some of the things you can do. If you need help, feel free to comment or contact me, I am available for freelance work too, can optimize your site for $20.

Exactly about how many HTTP requests the server makes is about reducing them and speeding up the web.

Although there really isn’t an ideal number of files or file size to which the web page can be reduced, Hubspot recommends aiming about 10-30 files. However, with many large websites that need high-quality footage, photographs and other interactive content, this is not a practical target.

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So take heart that the total amount of web requests is only 99 per post, according to Steve Souders, an internet efficiency analyst formerly at Yahoo! and Google – so seek to strive for less than that. Reducing HTTP requests on the WordPress site is about doing away with stuff you don’t use. If you have loads of things on your WordPress website, there would be tons of requests for HTTP and fairly sluggish page rates.

Declutter your web, customize images, address render-blocking files, use caching and ensure that your host supports HTTP/2 to minimize HTTP requests. Other than that, seek to build websites that are easy and clean and do not need a lot of assets to launch.

If you have any concerns, please tell me in the comment section below. Cheers websites quicker, and a better future ahead!. Yeah, the joys of creating Websites for WordPress. There’s so much that can be achieved inside WordPress, but it’s easy to lose sight of how all those gorgeous templates, interesting extensions, and amazing pictures can become overwhelming in a browser’s eyes just trying to handle it all. But, never be afraid: if you keep a page speed tracking tool near by and follow the above nine server request mitigation guidelines, your site output will be ok.

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Keith Rainz

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