I block all third-party requests with ublock and enable them one at a time (targeted, by looking at what they are manually) to get websites working again (when I really want to). It is generally insane how many external requests are 'needed' to display very basic websites like blogs or general information websites of companies.
There is lots of information on optimizing images and whenever I speak to designers they always say "don't worry, we optimize the images", which is great of course, but they completely overlook all the JS. Many websites don't only load more JS in terms of raw file size, but the parsing of all this JS then, again, takes more time than loading all of CSS and images, combined. And for what? Usually some annoying pop-ups, image sliders or some chat-box. In fact, those chat-boxes themselves load complete web pages in the iframe they are created in. I also see websites loading multiple versions of jQuery.
Anyway, 117 external requests for anything, let alone a blog, is insane.
There is lots of information on optimizing images and whenever I speak to designers they always say "don't worry, we optimize the images", which is great of course, but they completely overlook all the JS. Many websites don't only load more JS in terms of raw file size, but the parsing of all this JS then, again, takes more time than loading all of CSS and images, combined. And for what? Usually some annoying pop-ups, image sliders or some chat-box. In fact, those chat-boxes themselves load complete web pages in the iframe they are created in. I also see websites loading multiple versions of jQuery.
Anyway, 117 external requests for anything, let alone a blog, is insane.