When designing and developing a website, it’s a good idea to pay attention to the number of HTTP requests your site generates when someone visits your site. Why? By reducing the number of requests, your website loads faster – and consumes less energy. Use these tips to optimize your WordPress site!
What Is a HTTP Request?
When you visit any website, your browser sends a request to the server where the website’s data is located. In fact, multiple requests are sent: every image, video, or any other file is handled as its own, individual HTTP request.
For example, loading a single page on a website can consist of 50 HTTP requests. If a website has one hundred visitors a month, and they all load one page, it sums up to 5,000 requests.
Usually, the number of HTTP requests caused by a single page load may be significantly higher, easily up to one hundred if the site hasn’t been optimized. Luckily, even small actions can reduce the total amount of requests, and a site with around 20 requests can be considered well-optimized. Keep reading and get the tips on how you can optimize your site and reduce the number of HTTP requests!
What Does a HTTP Request Look Like
When a server receives and processes a request from a visitor’s browser, it sends back a response that includes the requested information, such as the website’s HTML code. The server’s response also provides an HTTP status code: if the request was successful, the response is 200 OK. If the page or information wasn’t found, the response might be 404 Not Found. You can read more about HTTP status codes in one of our earlier blog posts.
This is what a single HTTP request looks like on the server side in the site’s logs (nginx-access.log). From it, we can see that our WordPress hosting plan page was fetched (“GET”), the request was successful (200), and that I, the author, was using Mozilla Firefox as my browser.
seravo.com - - [12/Aug/2025:19:24:05 +0300] "GET /en/plans/ HTTP/1.1" 200 29964 "https://seravo.com/en/" "Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Ubuntu; Linux x86_64; rv:141.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/141.0"What is HTTPS?
HTTPS (HyperText Transfer Protocol Secure) is the encrypted version of the HTTP protocol. It ensures that the information transferred between your browser and the server is protected and not visible to outsiders. You can check if your connection is secured with HTTPS by looking at the information in your browser’s address bar. At Seravo, all connections are secured, and HTTPS is enabled by default.
How to Minimize the Amount of HTTP Requests in WordPress
You should pay attention to the number of HTTP requests when you’re still in the design and development phase. If you have an existing WordPres site, worry not – you can also reduce the number of requests later on by getting rid of unnecessary features and loading only the resources that are essential.
Effective Caching
The number of files needed to load a webpage, and therefore the number of HTTP requests, decreases significantly when the site’s cache is performing well.
When you visit a site for the first time, your browser downloads all the necessary files and saves them for later use. The next time you return to the site or navigate to another page on the same site, the browser can use the files it has already saved. This means only a few additional HTTP requests are needed, which significantly decreases the page loading time.
Seravo’s premium WordPress hosting is a complete solution with an efficient caching, all pre-installed for you. You don’t have to install extra plugins or worry about the settings for caching to work effectively. However, there are other factors you should consider to reduce the number of HTTP requests on your site!
Remove, Minify, Merge
All plugins and themes installed on your WordPress site may also increase the number of HTTP requests it generates. It is a good idea to carefully review the list of add-ons from time to time and remove any add-ons whose features or functions are no longer needed. Removing unnecessary add-ons also improves the security of your site.
If there are multiple styles (CSS) and script files (JS, JavaScript), it is a good idea to merge them into separate files. Also, make sure that the files have been minified, so that they can be loaded faster.
There are plugins available for combining and optimizing style and script files that are easy to implement, such as WP-Optimize. You can find these plugins in the WordPress plugin directory. However, be sure to check that the plugin does not create a conflict with other plugins installed on your site.
By examining the browser console data before and after installing the plugin, you can ensure that the installation has the desired effect. Also, remember to take an extra backup of your site before making any changes!
Lazy Loading
Lazy loading only loads images (or videos, for example) when the user scrolls to the point on the page where the resource is located. Lazy loading is a standard feature in WordPress from version 5.5 onwards, and for individual images, you can specify whether they should be loaded lazily or not.
Read more about lazy loading on web.dev to see examples. Keep in mind that not all content should be loaded lazily, as search engines may not prioritize them. As a rule of thumb, if an image is visible in the browser as soon as the page is opened, it should not be loaded lazily. You can find more information in Google’s guidelines.
Block Unnecessary Bots
Most bots are useful, such as those that crawl the web for search engines, indexing pages so that they appear in search results. The more popular a website is, the more it attracts bots. You can give bots instructions on how to behave using a robots.txt file – more detailed instructions can be found in Seravo’s knowledge base.
However, it is worth remembering that not all bots follow the rules, and updating the instructions can take time. Seravo filters out harmful traffic, and our 24/7 monitoring intervenes in problem situations on websites. It is not always possible to know whether web traffic is desired for visibility of the site, or unnecessary scanning that burdens it. This is why it is a good idea to keep an eye on site analytics and block search engine bots that do not actually bring organic traffic to the site.
Looking for WordPress Hosting? We Got You Covered
Seravo’s hosting plans’ pricing is based on the number of monthly HTTP requests – not the used bandwidth. We want to encourage our customers to get started with optimization, as well-functioning and optimized sites use resources more efficiently and thus also save energy.
As our customer, you don’t pay extra for website maintenance, as the WordPress service package includes everything you need:
- Efficiently cached, WordPress-optimized servers and scalable architecture that can handle visitor spikes
- One free domain, automatic renewal, and access to DNS records when the domain is managed by Seravo
- Automatic daily backups, each available for one month
- Automatic, tested updates for WordPress and plugins
- Round-the-clock monitoring of your site and fast response to any errors
- Developer tools to speed up your work
- Seravo Plugin with additional settings and tools for site maintenance and security, among other things
- Help and support for using WordPress and troubleshooting any issues
- …and much more!
No matter the size or type of your WordPress site, we have a hosting plan that’s a great fit! See all plans, their features, amount of allowed HTTP requests and prices on the plans page.
- WP Start for beginners, blogs, and basic sites
- 150,000 HTTP requests per month
- WP Pro for small and medium-sized businesses
- 500,000 HTTP requests per month
- WP Business for online stores and busy sites
- 1,500,000 HTTP requests per month
- WP Corporate for large, high-traffic sites and multisites
- 3,000,000 HTTP requests per month
- WP Enterprise tailored to your needs
- over 3,000,000 HTTP requests per month
How to Keep Track of HTTP Requests?
When your site is hosted by Seravo, a report is compiled each month with GoAccess, showing the amount of HTTP requests and additional information about incoming web traffic. The data can be found directly in the WordPress admin panel under Seravo Plugin settings (Tools > Site Status). This allows you to easily check your website’s traffic at any time. By examining the reports in more detail, you can find out which pages are loaded frequently and which ones should be optimized.
Steady WordPress with Seravo
With Seravo, you can rest assured that your WordPress site will remain secure as its popularity grows! There will never be any additional charges for exceeding traffic limits, and access to your website will never be blocked under any circumstances.
We want to ensure that your website is always available and functioning flawlessly, regardless of how many visitors it has. If the amount of allowed HTTP requests are repeatedly exceeded each month, we will contact you to find a more suitable hosting plan.
