Why Sleek CSS Matters

CSS is now par for the course for all web designers when it comes to styling the way their sites look and respond. Without it the online world would be an entirely different place – without it, we’d be back in 1995!

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However, as with everything good, there is a price to pay. CSS takes a whole heap of processing, which means greater loading times for websites that are heavy on the cascading style sheet. Sure, you can get yourself a tip-top cheap VPS hosting package to help serve your pages quicker, but if your CSS is clunky things can get ugly fast (or slow, as the case may be).

So, what’s the solution?

As we all agree that CSS is vital to the modern day website, we still need to use it in order to get the results that we want. Therefore, we need to make sure that we do one or two things in order to make sure that our sites load quickly; giving users the best possible experience each and every time they visit our pages.

Keep it minimal

Keeping your CSS to a minimum will be a huge help to your page load times. The greater the amount of external CSS, the longer your page will take to load. Having multiple CSS files on a page creates additional requests to the browser that are often unnecessary and cumbersome. Even a single external CSS file can affect loading times when using smaller sized script. Use inline scripts wherever possible in order to keep load time to a minimum.

Defer to JavaScript

When a page requires an average amount of CSS script it is always best practice to inline the CSS. However, if the amount of CSS needed is bordering on the large to humungous size, it is best to only inline the CSS necessary to produce the opening view of the required page. The rest of CSS should be deferred to JavaScript as huge CSS scripts can actually do more harm than good to load times when inlined.

Don’t use CSS @Import

Using this function allows you to import external CSS files into your CSS scripts. However, this can kill load speed as each file will be loaded separately instead of in conjunction with other files deemed necessary to render the page it is placed on. Not only that, it also creates a whole bunch of unnecessary HTTP requests too.

Minify

Compression can help your pages to load far quicker than if they are left as is. Reducing files to their minimum size will reduce the download amounts that each visitor to your page has to make. The smaller the download, the faster a page will load up.

Strip out style tags in your HTML

Having style tags inside your HTML will affect the speed of your page considerably as it render blocks whenever accessed. Instead, place your CSS codes inside the header CSS scripts that you are using. This will help your page to load smoothly and shorten the amount of time that your visitor will be confronted with a blank white page.

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