The most preferred methods for mitigating the number of image requests are CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) sprites.

You can amalgamate background images in a solitary one and can utilize CSS background position and background image properties to show the required image segment.

A useful way of reducing HTTP requests and dropping the dimension of your page is by combining inline images in the cached style.

An important point to remember is that inline images are still not easily supported across major browsers 40 60 percent of routine visitors surfing your site usually come with an empty cache thereby making your webpage load at a faster speed for the visitors coming for the first time. This ensures a better user experience.

CSS can be employed to create banners and buttons. It is simple to use a crystal clear PNG image file. With the aid of CSS, it is easier to create dynamic images that are great in looks and have fewer code lines.

Most of the top websites spend around 5 percent to 38 percent of their time downloading the HTML document. The remaining 62 percent to 95 percent of the time in downloading is exhausted in making HTTP requests for fetching all the constituents in the HTML document (i.e. scripts, images, and style sheets).

The presence of having various components in the webpage is enhanced by the fact that browsers usually download just two or four constituents in parallel per hostname depending on the HTTP version of the user’s browser and the response.

Our vast experience suggests that decreasing the number of HTTP requests had the largest impact on mitigating time and is frequently the simplest performance development to make.

The above mentioned are the major advantages achieved using CSS Sprites. These advantages are also the main reason for its popularity among developers.

Benefits of CSS Sprites in SEO

A request for the required webpage is made at the server whenever a web browser visits a website. The webpage comprises images referenced in its HTML code. These can be as photos in graphics or blog posts to create a theme for the site.

All the images are individual files and it’s the responsibility of the browser to request them separately and individually. For every image incorporated in the webpage, the browser must initiate an individual request asking for that image from the related server. This request is finally processed by the concerned server and the file is sent back to the browser. The entire process of transferring back and forth for every file requires a trivial amount of processing and bandwidth.

CSS sprites are revealing enhanced usage credibility in web designing based on Search engine optimization. The technical aspects of CSS sprites are effectively utilized by high-traffic social media social sites such as Facebook, Twitter, Digg, and Search Engines such as Yahoo. The rapid loading time of nowadays heavy traffic database sites rendering them the favorite sites for web surfers. Large scale businesses and small scale businesses are now realizing and pondering that they are using sprites to their present website’s front-end design.

Image Courtesy:

1) hurricanesoftwares.com