Routes and pages are very similar concepts and are often used interchangeably by Backbone programmers. This is natural since routes are essentially just the Backbone implementation of pages. However, there are important differences between the two, at least when you compare the pages of a multi-page website to the routes of a Backbone single-page application.

In traditional, multi-page websites, each new page that the user visits requires you to make a new request to the site's server. In a Backbone-powered site, however, the user can navigate through as many pages (routes) as they want, making new requests only when it is necessary to fetch new data. This feature alone accounts for a significant increase in speed on a Backbone-powered site.

Another important difference is that standard web pages trigger an entire page load, whereas routes trigger only a specific JavaScript function. This means that unlike a traditional application, which has to limit the...