16th November 2021, 1 min read

Accelerating Page Load Times by Reducing Requests

In trying to decrease load times of this blog, I noticed that the prism.js library requires quite a number of requests to the unpkg-server. So I tried to combine all these requests into only two. The results are quite impressive.

I compared various measurements using tools.pingdom.com.

Old situation, C-80, 1.67s load time:

I now downloaded the prism.js JavaScript code in one single file and stored this file on my web-server. New situation has now improved quite significantly:

Number of requests went down from 33 to 9. Performance grade went from C-80 to A-93, load time is 947ms.

I deliberately took the US as reference, as many readers of this blog come from the US. Running the test from Frankfurt, Germany, the result is A-93 (as before) and 244ms load time:

This load time is very similar when I download this page locally in my own network. Below image is from developer-tools in Brave/Chrome:

This result is quite surprising at first, as prism.js is hosted on unpkg.com, which is self-described as "fast, global content delivery network". Apparently, hosting something on your own server can be way faster than on some CDN.

Also see Accelerating Page Load Times by Reducing Requests, Part #2.