The Importance of HTTP

So I was visiting a popular news website recently. I was looking for one article, a short article, that I was going to read and then be on my way. I figured my entire visit to this site would last about 30 seconds.

Unfortunately, the time it took for this page to load was over 50 seconds.

And here’s what kills me: the web page itself was less than a single megabyte in size. It should not have taken 50+ seconds to load. It shouldn’t have taken even 5 seconds to load. So I opened up handly ol’ Firebug.

The stats for this website were about like this: They had just over 200 http requests.  106 of those were images, most of which were small social networking icons, advertisements in the sidebars, etcetera. 50 more of those were external javascripts, meaning analytics, fancy content scrollers, twitter widgets, jQuery. Then they had a video preloading (making the assumption that I wanted to watch that video), a podcast preloading (again, making an assumption), and they had 20 external CSS sheets.

Yeah. It was that bad.

Which brings me to my point. HTTP requests are underrated. I know that I, for one, wouldn’t struggle over the decision to put another image on my site, mainly because one image doesn’t make much of a difference. But it does make a difference, a very large one, after you do that several (or several hundred) times. So my call to all of you web designers/developers out there is merely this: combine your stuff. It really isn’t that hard. In ten years I really don’t want to see any websites with 200 http requests, because it’s just silly, and we should know better. And we do know better. And that’s all.