How do you reduce the number and size of HTTP requests for page speed and SEO?

It is critical especially for E-Commerce sites to secure a good CDN plan. If you believe the speed your sites pages load are important now, it’s getting ready to be more essential. Devices will continue to get more powerful and the new generations of consumers will demand quick responses to hold grab their attention.

CDNs are table stakes for any serious websites or merchants in the long-run. Google has progressively raised the bar on site speed to the point where it's mandatory to not only serve up content that's localized, but to also compress and optimize images. While it's possible to manually replicate some of the functions of a CDN, it's not practically scalable. The most common providers in the eCommerce world include Cloudflare, Akamai, UploadCare, and Amazon Cloudfront to name a few. Most eCommerce platform providers integrate with a CDN; for example, both BigCommerce and Shopify both leverage Cloudflare.

A CDN offers numerous benefits for website owners. It can speed up website loading times by distributing content across a network of servers worldwide, handle traffic spikes, enhance security, and reduce bandwidth costs. With a CDN with us at Top Level Traffic, your website can be faster, more reliable, more secure, and even save you money. It's like having a superhero on your team. ??♀???

New AI driven optimization will make it much easier to remove redundant nonessential code, and minify all your files. In short. Your website will load extremely fast and your customers ( users) experience will be great. This is not something you will be able to skip if you want to remain competitive.

A CDN can minify and concatenate your files to reduce their size and the number of requests needed to load your web page. Some CDNs offer these features as part of their services, automatically optimizing your files for faster loading times and reduced bandwidth usage. With advanced optimization techniques like image optimization and caching, a CDN can take your website's performance to the next level. It's a simple and effective way to optimize your website and keep it running smoothly. ????

Minification can provide some marginal benefits for site speed that may be worth the lift. This is especially true for minimizing the number of HTTP requests to prevent DOM bloat. However, it's important to consider difficulty of code modification when specifically removing whitespace, comments, and formatting from core theme files.

I love the “lazy load” coding. It only makes sense to delay all that loading of large files until they are within view of your users.

Lazy loading images outside of the initial viewport is often considered a best practice. Make sure when implementing Lazy Loading to use Lazy Loading with Low-quality Image Preview (LQIP) if possible to avoid or mitigate Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS) impacts. As a best practice, never lazy load images within the initial viewport or critical images. It's also worth considering prefetching and setting fetch priority to high for images that comprise the Largest Contentful Paint (LCP).

Lazy loading is a technique that defers the loading of non-critical resources, such as images, until they are needed. Some CDNs offer a lazy load feature that automatically loads images only when they come into view, improving website performance and user experience. Lazy loading can also save bandwidth, reduce hosting costs, and improve SEO. With Top Level Traffic's CDN's lazy load feature, you can sit back and relax while your website loads faster and performs better. ??

We do this on all our website we create. It is much easier to fully optimize your images size, alt text, media query tags at the time you are building your site. Older websites ( almost all websites) will need to be redesigned to be crawled by the search engines that are now fully AI driven.

Optimizing images reduces their file size, making them take up less space on your server and requires fewer data overall to be transferred, which can reduce the number and size of HTTP requests, and improve website speed and efficiency. Optimized images also improve website SEO. For example, our CDNs at Top Level Traffic offer automatic image optimization features, making it easy to improve website performance and appearance. With image optimization, your website can look great and perform even better. ??

Image optimization is a huge part of improving site speed metrics such as LCP, CLS, and other downstream metrics. Typically JPEG is considered the best format for a balance of compatibility (some browsers and platforms do not support WebP) and size. The only functionality JPEG lacks is a transparent layer, so if that's needed a well-optimized PNG can serve instead. More importantly, though, image weight and dimensions are often not well optimized. Tools like Cloudinary and TinyPNG allow for automatic or manual optimization of images even beyond how much common image programs like Photoshop can achieve.

I've always found changing to WebP format reduces size and keeps quality better than optimising JPG and PNG. Using Srcset to responsively show the correct size image also helps massively.

These are high level coding terms that are all a part of properly optimizing your websites. Please remember how important your website is to your business. Even those of you who believe referral/word of mouth is your bread and butter. Things have changed. Your sites are easy prey for competitors to retarget. ( Someone goes to your website they will get an ad on the device they use telling your customers why they are a better choice than you are!!!) people romanticize the horse and buggy but that doesn’t mean they will choose that means of transportation.

Reducing the number of fonts and icons on your website reduces the number of HTTP requests needed to load it, improving website speed, efficiency, and SEO. Simplifying your website's design can also make it more visually appealing and memorable. By focusing on essential design elements, you can create a cohesive website that stands out from the crowd. It's like decluttering your website's wardrobe, leaving only the essential pieces that make it look and perform its best. ????

Absolutely combining requests, reducing the amount of requests to 3rd party servers, and loading as many assets off of a single CDN can help boost site speed to a small to moderate degree. Always make sure to specify a fallback font when using an external font to avoid flicker or delays.

Having worked with hundreds of merchants over the years for site speed, in my experience the top 3 places to improve speed are: Image optimization, using a good theme that passes Core Web Vitals out of the box, and making sure to correctly queue and manage 3rd party scripts and apps. Using more powerful tools like WebPageTest versus PageSpeed Insights is also very important, as many site speed tools are very platform agnostic and offer generalized recommendations with moderate to low ability to double-click into a particular flagged issue or run simulations.

Now is truly the time to get started on reevaluating your website. The last year in particular has brought more advancements in website optimization than the previous 6 years. Please reach out to professionals. ( not the rep that sells you your local ads) NOW IS NOT THE TIME TO AVOID UPGRADING OR REDOING YOUR WEBSITE.

Audit your tags! Using software for tag governance can help identify tags that are loading in the background of your pages. Often you can adjust your tags or disable tags that add to load times. Looking at an aggregate waterfall of tag load times is a key advantage here.

Reducing the number and size of HTTP requests for page speed and SEO can be achieved through various methods like using a CDN, optimizing images, simplifying website design, combining files, plus enabling browser caching (To name a few). A CDN reduces distance between server and visitors, while image optimization reduces file size. Simplifying design by using fewer fonts and icons, and combining files can also help. Over at Top Level Traffic we understand, enabling browser caching allows visitors to store files, reducing HTTP requests for subsequent visits. By improving website speed and efficiency, it becomes more user-friendly and improves chances of ranking higher in search results.