hello John,
Thanks for spotting this.
I checked what you describe, the whole page is not actually re-loaded twice, there’s just an additional request in cases when there’s no header background image set, causing an empty bg url request is being added that may seem like a 2nd page request in the network tab.
We can tweak the code to improve this, I wouldn’t worry about it too much though, it has no very tiny impact on page load speed.
We’ll tweak the code in the next release (should be out soon).
regards
Imre