5 Thumb Rules to Optimize CSS and Speed Up Your Website

Did you know that if your website took more than 4 seconds to load, 1 out of every 4 visitors are likely to leave it? Ideally, a website is meant to open within 3 seconds. Once it starts taking longer, your bounce rate starts increasing. In order to improve your website speed, you need to optimize it in many ways.

One of the ways of improving your website speed service is by optimizing your CSS code. Let’s see how to optimize CSS for your website:

Here are 5 List to optimize the website CSS and Increase Website Speed

Have a Clean Code

Let me clarify the definition of “clean code” here. It’s not just about keeping it free from errors and presenting it neatly. In fact, keeping more white spaces in your code takes up a lot of bytes, thus making the file heavier. Your code needs to be structured properly, contain short class & ID names and has to be free of any unnecessary characters, which includes space.

Optimize Images

Any images you insert in your website through CSS need to be optimized. The original size of the image file is usually heavy, which makes the website slower. You can do this by using:

• Sprite images for all icons and graphics
• CSS font styling over graphical texts
• Font-based icons over graphical fonts

Combine CSS Files with JavaScript Files

A single CSS file will get you an HTTP GET request for a web page. These HTTP requests usually tend to slow down the speed of loading your website. Hence, in order to reduce the number of HTTP requests per web page, you can combine your CSS files with JavaScript files by using PHP. There has been a case in which doing so has reduced the response time of the server by 1.16 seconds.

Use External CSS Files Instead of Including Them in HTML

When your CSS file is separate, it gets cached in the user’s browser every time they open your website. Hence, when they open it again, they’ll already have your stylesheet, which loads the website even faster. However, if you add CSS code into your HTML file instead of putting it in the stylesheet, the user will be devoid of the benefit of browser caching.

The CSS File Needs to Be on Top

Your website speed is also affected by which files load first and which ones are to load later. Ideally, your CSS files should load first. Thus, you need to call the CSS files in your HTML head tags for all web pages so that the file loads first.

Overall, there are plenty of ways to optimize your website speed. CSS optimization is only one of the ways in which you can improve the speed of your website. Working on your HTML and JavaScript files, image size, optimizing plugins, reducing HTTP redirects, and using content delivery networks are some other ways in which you can further improve your website speed too. So, if your website is taking time to load, just test its flaws and check what you need to work on.