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Does your website load slowly? Many factors could make WordPress slower. Not only is it slow, but you must know that getting a faster website needs to do something with HTTP requests. If you can make your site have fewer HTTP requests, you’ll notice that your site speeds up and improves its load times much faster. Let’s learn how to reduce your WordPress website HTTP requests while trying to achieve page speed.
Implement optimization techniques to reduce your WordPress website’s HTTP requests. Reducing HTTP requests makes your site load faster and improves its overall user experience (UX).
In this article, I will share the best tips for reducing the number of HTTP requests, which will help you load your site much faster, improve user experience, and improve search ranking.
Let’s get started.
What are HTTP Requests?
Before I walk you through how to reduce HTTP requests, It’s Important to Know what they are and how they can impact your website speed while achieving page performance.
You know about HTTP requests, which is why you are here, right? You also know it is directly connected to page speed in some ways. But there is a bit more than that.
To understand HTTP requests while discussing page speed, let’s know what happens behind the scenes when you visit a web page in a web browser.
- You visit a web page using a browser
- Browser sends the HTTP requests to the server
- HTTP request occurs when the browser requests files to download
- Server response to all the file requests by the browser that needed to load a website
- Once all the files have loaded, you can view and interact with the website content.
All the above happens quickly on faster websites. It takes a second or two for a web page to load fully, but it takes longer for slower areas.
You can better understand the HTTP requests process, which is theoretically simple. The fewer HTTP requests your site can make, the faster it can load.
What can you do to reduce your site’s HTTP requests? Based on our experience and research, we have compiled eight simple ways to help you reduce your WordPress site’s HTTP requests.
But before we can dive deeper to reduce your site’s HTTP requests, let’s understand its basic principles:
- More files = More HTTP requests
- Larger files = Long HTTP requests
Remember, the more files there are, the more HTTP requests. Also, the larger the files are, the longer the time it takes for HTTP requests.
Now, can you see it? Fewer and smaller files can help you speed up your WordPress website. So you can reduce the number of files on your site to only what you need and make those files as small as possible.
Tracking your site’s HTTP requests can give you more insight into how to improve its speed and reduce its HTTP requests.
Soon, you’ll be able to make your WordPress website load faster than ever. But first, let’s test your site’s HTTP requests and speed.
Related Reading: Factors That Are Affecting Your Site’s Speed
Test Your Site’s HTTP Requests
The best way to test is to request HTTP on your WordPress site. We need a tool to help us track the site’s HTTP requests.
There are some options we can use:
- Web tools such as GTmetrex or Pingdom.
- WordPress Plugins like Query Monitor.
If you decide to use the web tools, all you need to do is click one of the above links and enter your website URL to test.
After the tool scans your website, you’ll see how many HTTP requests there are currently; it also provides you with more insight into your website’s performance, which will overwhelm you.
Reduce HTTP Requests on Your WordPress Website
Several things should be done on your WordPress website to minimize the request size. Let’s go over them together.
After applying all these techniques, you’ll notice your site load faster and improve its page load time.
1. Combine CSS & JavaScript
Your WordPress website comes with multiple CSS and Javascript files; combining HTTP requests is one of the best ways to reduce HTTP requests.
However, combining CSS stylesheets and Javascript requires some coding and technical knowledge. But don’t worry If you need to learn how to work with CSS and JavaScript.
Thanks to the WordPress plugins, there are easy ways to combine the CSS and JavaScript files without doing it manually.
You can get access to tons of plugins available to download and install to complete your desired add-on functionalities on WordPress.
Combine CSS & JavaScript files using WordPress plugins; many WordPress caching plugins include this feature to help you speed up your WordPress website.
Use W3 Total Cache, LiteSpeed, WP Super Cache, etc. These are great plugins for combining the CSS and Javascript files to minimize the number of requests.
2. Minify Code (HTML, CSS, & JavaScript)
We discussed the combination of CSS and Javascript and minimizing. Let’s talk about code minification. Code minification is another factor in reducing HTTP requests for your WordPress site.
You can use the plugin to minify your code.
Have you installed one of the plugins, as mentioned earlier? If YES, you’ll be able to find the minification options. The cache plugin will help you quickly minify your code (HTML, CSS, and Javascript), giving your site fewer HTTP requests.
What happens when you enable the minify feature on your cache plugin? It will automatically trim out the unnecessary of your website’s code. Good examples of this trimming include trimming out white spaces and comments.
These are initially added to support the code’s readability. However, they are optional, and they must execute the code correctly.
3. Reduce Image Files Size
Images aid content and make your site look more professional and attractive, but they also negatively impact your site’s speed when you upload large images.
The best way to make it beneficial for both is to optimize your images by reducing their size as small as possible. This method will improve your site’s load time while affecting other metrics.
You can use options to reduce your image file size and compress it to speed up your WordPress website by reducing the HTTP requests and boosting site load times. Use web tools like Tiny PNG to compress and resize images before uploading them to your website.
There are also WordPress image optimization plugins to optimize your image for speed; the plugins provide a wide range of image optimization features to ensure your website gets load speed and improves your site’s SEO.
Here are some excellent image optimization plugins you can use while improving page speed:
- Smush
- EWWW Image Optimizer
- ShortPixel
4. Remove Unused Images
As you can see, images dramatically impact your site’s speed and HTTP requests, so having many photos on your webpage is not a good idea.
The best practice is to keep the needed image and remove all unnecessary images on posts and pages, including only what is required.
5. Disable or Deleted Unused Plugins
Plugins are add-on extensions for your WordPress website that add extra functionality to your website for any purpose when needed. However, it also has the advantage when you install too many plugins on your site.
The two main issues you’ll face when you have too many plugins running on your WordPress website are increased CPU usage and increased HTTP requests.
So, to ensure your sites receive fewer HTTP requests, you need to disable or delete unneeded or inactive plugins.
6. Enable Image Lazy Load
We had talked about reducing image size and deleting unneeded images earlier. Still, another image optimization helps improve your website load speed and reduce the site’s HTTP requests, which is lazy loading your image.
Does it sound so complicated? Don’t worry. It’s effortless and straightforward to optimize your image for lazy load by using the image lazy load plugin and enabling it on your site.
Lazy Load by WP Rocket is one of the best WordPress plugins that help you optimize and enable your image lazy load on your site to improve its performance and reduce HTTP requests.
You can also use other image optimization plugins to optimize images for improved page speed.
7. Use Cache Plugin
Considering that using cache plugins is the best way to optimize your website for speed, the cache plugins provide an all-in-one solution to optimize your website for better performance.
It has many features that boost page load times, including image optimization, page cache, browser cache, and database optimization. These features help reduce your site’s HTTP requests and increase page speed.
Many WordPress cache plugins, including free and paid versions, are available for download and use on your WordPress site.
Here are some of the most famous cache plugins when improving page speed is vital:
- WP Rocket (Premium)
- NitroPack (Free & Premium)
- LiteSpeed (Free)
- W3 Total Cache (Free & Premium)
- WP Super Cache (Free)
8. Use a CDN
CDN has become the most popular method for optimizing a website for performance while achieving site speed. CDN aims to store your website data on the nearest local server to visitors to boost your site load time when delivering your content.
The CDN stands for Content Delivery Network and is used to help improve site performance, boost site load times, and improve your site’s SEO. In addition to these site performance features, it will also help you reduce your site HTTP requests and speed up your WordPress site.
Moreover, CDN can improve your site search ranking, driving tons of organic traffic from search engines like Google to your business and getting you high conversion rates.
Conclusion
How To reduce your WordPress website HTTP Requests?
HTTP Requests are a must-hon factor when optimizing your website for speed and improving its SEO. Reducing HTTP requests will give you more benefits, including speeding up your WordPress website, improving website SEO, boosting search ranking, driving more traffic, and getting a high conversion rate.
In this article, I combined all the methods that help you reduce your website HTTP requests and improve your page load times to enhance your site visibility on the SERP pages.
This article and strategies will help you to reduce your site’s HTTP requests, boost its page speed, and improve SEO to get a higher ranking position on Google’s SERP of Google. If you liked the content, don’t hesitate to ask for WordPress advice. We would love to sort out things for you with one-time support plans, live sessions, or error removals.
Author Bio: Oun is the founder of TheSEOBlog.net. He helps the new entrepreneur grow their online presence and increase their sale through his search engine optimization (SEO). As an SEO expert, he knows how to boost a website’s visibility on the SERP, which can drive more traffic and sales.