What’s a sprite?

When a website is developed common scenario is to put all of your images used in the UI in a .css file. Yes some did not use it, which I think is too much old school, but however maybe 99.9% did make it that way. In fact in nowadays sites we’ve more and more rounded corners, more alpha in our images. But what’s a sprite at all.

Well imagine you’ve 20 of these images requested in you .css file, if we suggest we’ve only one stylesheet file. Than when your page is rendered into a browser there must be 20 requests to the server for those images. And so many requests may really slow down your page load. Using only one image with correct

background-image
background-position

properties in you css make your site load really fast. Continue reading sprite usage and website optimization →