to sprite or not to sprite

Question

Hey so i have clearly heard of sprites before ... but I am a little confused on weather I should be using them on my sit. All of my share icons are font's so no need to use them there! however on my foote looks like this and I thought this would be good spot to have maybe 3 different sprites(depending on screen resolutions and dimensions)... However I have read in the past that there is some places sprites should be used and when I attempted to use spritme.org bookmark tool it did not suggest to sprite these together ... Is there some reason I shouldn't be using sprites for this? just as a note not sure if it matters but avg. width of each little image is aproximately 250px wide

Just wondering if anyone can give me some insight into why this shouldn't be a sprite any help would be greatly appreciated

Answer 1

Here you're talking about HTTP requests number -v- Healty SEO
If you care about Search Engines returning your website in the Images Search for that only image i.e. "SWIX" just cause you used a single image with a needed alt tag, knowing you'll have 21+ requests to the server for your images... than go for it.
If you Want to keep your requests for images to a minimum, than go for sprite.

You can test the difference in any developer tool Network tab - and see the average time that's needed to grab every uncached image from the server.

Answer 2

By making it a sprite you will make your visitors happier by making the website load faster for them. If you use sprite the browser makes only 1 request for the image. Otherwise it needs to do a roundtrip 7 times.

Also sprites are Web 3.0, and HTML5, 2013. And sexy.

Use sprites.