Open website without actually opening it in browser from terminal

Is it possible to open a website from terminal without it actually opening a new tab?

eg: open https://www.google.co.uk/ would open a new tab in the default application and go to that website.

I just want a command which mimics that call to the website but not open a tab or show anything.

Reason behind this is that I'm trying to call a command on a website, but don't want anything to pop up, I just want it to call the command.

You can use curl

curl https://www.google.co.uk/

and if you don't want the output

curl --silent https://www.google.co.uk/ > /dev/null

Curl and Wget can be used to call a website, but if you are wanting to mimic some function on the website then these wont accurately mimic a user running a request in a browser.

Browsers have engines in them that process css, javascript and html that's why you have to use them.

If you want to use a website as if a user was using the site through a browser without opening the browser you should look into some headless testing frameworks such as PhantomJS, otherwise browserstack a browser testing platform has an api you can access, this will still open a browser tab but in a cloud vm somewhere so no on your actual machine.