What Really Happens When You Open a Website?

That is the entire journey. Seven steps, and most of them take only milliseconds to complete.

A note on the "fixed" order

It is tempting to memorize these seven steps as a strict rule that happens every single time. In reality, browsers are smart, and they take shortcuts whenever possible.

If you revisit a site, your browser will usually skip several steps. It remembers the DNS answer for a while, it often reuses a TCP connection it already opened, and it can resume a previous TLS session. If the address is just http instead of https, step 4 doesn't happen at all. The seven-step sequence is just the cold start—the absolute most work a browser has to do. Keep the full version as your map, but know that the real thing is much faster.

The myth that one page is one download

Many people assume that loading a website means downloading "the page" as one single file. But that isn't true at all.

What actually comes back in step 6 is just the HTML document. That HTML is basically a list of other things the browser still needs to fetch: stylesheets, scripts, images, and fonts. Each of those items requires a completely separate request that repeats the steps above. A single modern web page usually fires off dozens of requests before it is completely drawn on your screen.

This is why the Network tab in your browser shows a massive list of rows when you load a single site. You asked for one page, but the page asked for everything else.

Try it now

You can watch this whole process happen live on a real site.

1. Open your browser's DevTools and click the Network tab.
2. Reload any web page and watch the rows fill in.
3. The very first row at the top is the HTML document, which is the response from step 6. Every row beneath it is one of the extra files the page pulled in to draw itself.
4. Hover over a row's timing bar, or open the Timing view for it. You will see labeled phases like DNS, Connecting, SSL/TLS, and Waiting. These are the exact steps you just read about, measured in real milliseconds.

You are looking at the entire journey captured live. We will return to this Network tab constantly.

What's Next

Every single step in that journey repeated the exact same pattern: the browser asks, and the server answers. The next chapter looks closely at that request and response contract, and explains what "client" and "server" actually mean.