Avoid chaining critical requests (original) (raw)

Critical request chainsare series of dependent network requests important for page rendering. The greater the length of the chains and the larger the download sizes, the more significant the impact on page load performance.

Lighthousereports critical requests loaded with a high priority:

A screenshot of the Lighthouse Minimize critical request depth audit

How Lighthouse identifies critical request chains

Lighthouse uses network priority as a proxy for identifying render-blocking critical resources. See Google's Chrome Resource Priorities and Schedulingfor more information about how Chrome defines these priorities.

Data on critical request chains, resource sizes, and time spent downloading resources is extracted from theChrome Remote Debugging Protocol.

How to reduce the effect of critical request chains on performance

Use the critical request chains audit results to target the resources that have the biggest effect on page load first:

Learn more about optimizing yourimages,JavaScript,CSS, andweb fonts.

Stack-specific guidance

Magento

If you are not bundling your JavaScript assets, consider using baler.

Resources

Source code for Minimize critical request depth audit