One Enter, many trips
Pressing Enter starts a chain of messages. Orange shows what goes out from your laptop, cyan shows what comes back, and it all happens in a fraction of a second.
The browser starts
The browser reads the URL: protocol https, name example.com, path /. It checks its cache, then hands the work to the laptop's network stack.
Over Wi-Fi to the router
Packets leave the laptop as radio frames. The router receives them, replaces your private address with your home's public IP, and sends them on to your ISP. Replies come back the same way.
DNS: name to number
Computers route by IP address, not by name. A DNS query goes to the resolver, which may ask the root, the .com server and the domain's own server, then returns the IP address.
Connecting to the server
Now the laptop opens a connection to that IP address in the data centre: a TCP handshake (SYN, SYN-ACK, ACK), then a TLS handshake where the server shows its certificate and keys are agreed. Then the encrypted HTTP GET request is sent.
The page comes back
The server replies with HTML, split into packets that travel back through the internet, the router and Wi-Fi. The browser reads the HTML, requests the CSS, scripts and images it mentions, and draws the page.