A website request means the data your browser asks for when visiting a website. The styles (CSS) and Javascript files, Images and videos are all requests. Each one of them gets called when a user visits a website.

The amount of requests is a good indicator to page speed. Close to 100 requests and you can guarantee your website will take seconds to load and be MB’s in size, 20 requests or less and you will have a quick webpage load speed.

Minimal requests = healthy page load speed

Understandably some websites will naturally have high request counts such as forums, but through wise page sorting and delegating you should be able to keep it down at something decent (50 odd). Excess widgets and plugins can really hit home hard.

The above screenshot is from Demonland, no wonder it is incredibly slow and crashes all the time. A modern web design disaster. Look at that request count and speed, goodness me.

How to keep the requests down

Some tips to minimize the effect request counts can have on your website would be to use a CDN to get lightning fast fetches and to store the requests at the same address, which comes with using a CDN. Combining files, compressing images, caching and minifying can also help the effects of a high request count.

If you want to see a websites request count and load speed simply open the Chrome or Firefox web developer tool panel, navigate to network and refresh the page to see the details.