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What Actually Happens When You Open a Website?

10 minBeginnerHTML · CSS · JS

In this lesson

  • Describe what a browser, a server and a request are
  • Know that a web page starts life as plain text files: HTML, CSS and JavaScript
  • Edit an HTML file and see the browser render your change

The big idea

A website is a set of text files. Your browser asks a server for them, then reads the text and draws the page.

When you type an address like wancode.my and press Enter, a lot happens in under a second. The good news: you only need four ideas to understand it.

Browser
The app you're using right now (Chrome, Safari, Firefox…). It requests files and turns them into a page.
Server
A computer somewhere on the internet that stores a website's files and sends them when asked.
Request / Response
The browser sends a request ("please send me this page"). The server sends back a response (the file).
HTML · CSS · JavaScript
HTML is the content and structure. CSS is the look. JavaScript is the behaviour.
Step through a page load. This is an illustration — no real network request is made.

The page is just text

Here is a complete web page. The words inside angle brackets — like <h1> — are tags. They tell the browser what each piece of text is: a heading, a paragraph, the page title.

index.html
<!DOCTYPE html>
<html lang="en">
  <head>
    <title>My Page</title>
  </head>
  <body>
    <h1>Hello, web!</h1>
  </body>
</html>
  • <head> holds information about the page. The <title> appears on the browser tab, not on the page itself.
  • <body> holds everything you can see.
  • The <link> tag in the editor's file pulls in style.css, which controls colours and spacing.

Nothing here is magic. If you can edit a text file, you can edit a website. Try it in the editor — the preview redraws as you type.

In index.html, change the text inside <h1> so it says hello from you (for example Hello, I'm Aina!). Then change the <title> to anything other than My Page.

Checks

  • The heading text has changed
  • The page title has changed

Check understanding

Q1

What does the browser do with the HTML file it receives?

Q2

Where does the text inside <title> appear?

What you learned

  • A browser requests files from a server and renders them.
  • Web pages are text: HTML for structure, CSS for style, JavaScript for behaviour.
  • Tags like <h1> and <p> label what each piece of content is.
Preview

Console output from your code appears here.

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