Cleaning up CSS stylesheets.
CSS files provide guidelines in how elements on a website appear and the behaviour of the components across different devices. The data may be served from a local static folder or through a Content Delivery Network(CDN). Code development is a continuous process. As such, the CSS files of a website may have several redundant rules that are no longer used by elements on the site. For instance, a website may contain a slider item with associated styles. Suppose later the website is updated and the slider removed, the styles may continue to exist in the CSS files though they are not being used anywhere in the website.
More CSS will load your app slow. These unused entries in the CSS files increase the load time of a website. Waiting for a website to load discourages the end-user and is not a pleasant experience. Developers should always focus on performance as it is one of the pillars of website development. Having increased load times can in-turn impact the subscription base of your blog or product.
Removing or deferring style rules that are not used by a document avoid downloads unnecessary bytes. Before a browser rendering contents of a web-page, the browser must download and parse all stylesheets that are required to generate the website layout. Though caching can be implemented to speed up the loading time, the browser has to load the stylesheets from the disk before the content is rendered. After downloading the stylesheets, the browser’s CSS engine has to evaluate all the rules defined in the stylesheets. Having unused CSS rules increases the overhead on the web-server, which drastically affects performance. As such, it is crucial to clean any unused CSS to reduce unnecessary bytes consumed by network activity.
It goes without saying that code maintainability and site performance go hand in hand. How a developer designs his code structure coupled with his mechanism of naming the HTML markup determines the ease of maintaining a codebase. A proper organization of your CSS and design patterns allows any future developer delegated the duty to maintain the codebase to understand the logic and flow behind it. Otherwise, code maintainability can be a nightmare.
Consistency with style guidelines is key to ensuring an optimal and clean user interface. In addition to having a clean user interface, designing an audit regarding the site’s CSS style guide could help develop a comprehensive and formal style guide on how the different pieces of code are used. This is also a significant move towards standardizing your system that is more maintainable in the future.
As discussed, CSS cleanup is a vital step towards ensuring that the site’s CSS is kept clean and mean. It also allows the development of an up to date documentation which in turn allows the development team to maintain the codebase. Once a website’s code structure is maintained and well structured, it’s performance is greatly improved-everyone benefits.