Combine images using CSS sprites to load website faster

CSS sprites is a good way to make your website load faster. Using CSS sprites we can combine different images on the website a make one big image. So why should we combine all the images and what’s the benefit behind this technique.

Oh Yes did you ever heard about HTTP requests that browser makes to your website server. YES or NO, If your answer is NO then let me give you a brief explanation about HTTP request.A website contains a lot of components and files. If a browser wants to load a website in it then it has to download each and every file that server sends to the browser. How does the browser communicates with the website server.

Browser uses so called HTTP requests to tell servers what ever file they want to download. So an image is also a file that browser should download every time it loads a website. So if there are many images in a website then there will be many HTTP request send by the web browser to website server. Remember that HTTP request are not parallel communications then are serial i.e after serving one HTTP request the other will be served. So downloading all the images one after the other takes a lot of time eventually making your website to load slowly. So using CSS sprites we combine all the images into one big image. In this way we reduce a lot of HTTP requests made by browser to website server.  So how we have to combine all the images in website? Are there any restriction to combine all the images?

What are the precautions we have to take while we combine images using css sprites and try to load website faster. How to Use CSS Sprite to combine images One best way to achieve CSS sprites is to use spriteme website. This website allows you to combine different images on your website. It checks for the compatibility of the images whether it can be rendered correctly in the same place after combining different images into one big image. By this time you may get a question in your mind that “How can a big image that was created by connecting different images on a particular website do the same work as different images were doing before combining them? Check below, an example of CSS sprite combined image of weblogcode website usingspriteme.

So let me clear this question also. We make use of CSS(Cascading Style Sheets) to position images in their places. Majorly background-position CSS property is utilized to place the images. We were talking about spriteme website and this can also give you all the CSS code that is responsible for placing images at the desired place. Check out this website and try to use CSS sprites in your website.

This will make your website to load super fast. We all know that majority of time website takes is to download images before they are rendered in the web browser. Is there a manual way to Combine images with CSS Sprite? OH yeah!! some times spriteme will not give results what you are desired. It gives you a detail information of what images you can sprite and what are the images that can’t make a CSS sprite. So many people try to do it manually so if you are trying to do it manually then you have to concentrate on combining images as well as applying correct CSS properties.

You have to make use of the following CSS properties below to effectively use this CSS sprites method.

background-image: url("Your combined image URL goes here");

background-position: (x-axis)px (y-axis)px;

min-height: 100%; /* example */

min-width: 100%;  /* example */

For combining images make use of SNAGIT software. There you can combine as many images as required. There is a possibility to maintain transparent background for over all combined image. So I tried SNAGIT to combine images and the result was successful. I was able to get the combined image with transparent background.