Reducing the number of asset requests means cutting down on the number of HTTP requests for resources the browser makes when loading the page. The fewer of these requests that are made, the better the overall application load speed, because HTTP as a protocol incurs a minor performance overhead, regardless of the size of the file itself. The most common approach to help this issue is through the use of JavaScript and CSS concatenation tools that merge multiple files in order to create fewer resources that are needed to load the page. With tools such as Angular-CLI, this is actually built into our application by default through the integrated WebPack build system. To do the same for our Express application, we will need to implement our own custom WebPack build system.