10/10/2019
3 THINGS YOU CAN DO TO REDUCE HTTP REQUESTS IN WORDPRESS
However, one particular area that’s often overlooked by beginners are HTTP requests. Now, if that term scares you off, don’t be. HTTP is one of those things that can affect a website’s speed and performance.
Here’s the thing, in today’s digital age, most visitors just don’t have the patience for a slow loading page or website and a badly managed HTTP server requests can affect your site’s user experience.
Well, in this article we take a quick look what HTTP requests are and share with you a few tips to help reduce them.
With that mind, let’s start with easiest method:
1. CLEAN AND DELETE UNUSED DATA FILES
Image files are the priority when cleaning up your WordPress but they not the only culprit. There are times when the issue with too many server requests stemming from data files or plugins that you’ve installed in your website that’s not being used but is taking up resources in the background.
Check if there are any plugins, themes, programs, or tools that you’ve installed and are not using in your website. Uninstall and delete them immediately to free your website’s resources.
2. COMBINE CSS AND JAVASCRIPT FILES
CSS and JavaScript files populates a WordPress website and having a lot them can be a problem to your website. The reason being, whenever a user visits your website, the browser will send each file a separate server request.
You can imagine how troublesome that would be if you had tens or hundreds of CSS and JavaScript files on your website.
In order to avoid all that, you can just merge them all into a single file. However, this requires a bit of technical knowledge.
3. USE LAZY LOADING TECHNOLOGY
Lazy loading is basically a technology in which a plugin or a tool limits the server requests for images by sending them only when a user actually scrolls down to that image in the page.
If lazy loading handles the images, then the WP Asset Cleanup plugin handles the irrelevant and used assets on your website.
The way it works is similar to lazy loading plugins in that, instead of delaying image server requests, the plugin will delay request for any plugins, files, or any other data asset that’s not being shown on the page the visitor is viewing.
Just like lazy loading, the plugin can help decrease the number of server requests that goes to a user’s browser by keeping the asset from being loaded and detected on a page that’s not using it.