HTTP requests: a click-along demo

Every time you click a link, your browser sends an HTTP request to a server, and the server sends back an HTTP response. Nothing here is hidden: this site is a handful of plain HTML files, and you can watch every single request happen.

Set up first (30 seconds)

Press F12 (or Ctrl+Shift+I) to open Chrome DevTools.
Click the Network tab.
Tick Disable cache, so every request really goes to the server.
Leave DevTools open, then click the links below and watch the list grow.

New to the Network tab? Start with How to read the Network panel.

The pages

Page	What it shows	Requests
How to read the Network panel	The columns, and what they mean	1
One image	HTML first, then the picture	2
Three images	One request per picture	4
An external stylesheet	Not just images — CSS is fetched too	2
A big image	Size and time columns	2
Cached images	Requests the browser can skip	3
Things that go wrong	Status code 404	2
Count the requests	Predict before you click	2
Words to know	Request, response, status, header	1

This page: 1 request. It is pure HTML with no pictures, so the browser asks for one file and is done.

Two things you might also spot

favicon.ico — the browser asking for the little icon shown on the browser tab. It asks on its own; you never wrote a link to it. If the server has no icon, this comes back 404.
Right-click any page and choose View page source. What you see is exactly what came back in the response — nothing more.