Best CSS Optimization Tips for Better Page Load Times

Sharing is caring!

The advent of technology has transformed the way the world used to work. The online world has in fact revolutionised our life and our perspective towards it in more ways than one.

In this fast paced world, one thing that goes without saying is that people today lack patience even though it is a virtue.

And this is especially evident among the website visitors. As businesses these days are keeping no stones unturned to serve their customers, they must understand that if their sites have slow page load times, no one is going to wait. And eventually their ventures are bound to fail.

Visitors are smitten by websites that load fast. Moreover, improving the website speed is essential not just for the customers but also for the search engines. Google has announced that only those websites whose load speeds are good will be selected for their search rankings.

Also Read: Why You Need A Full-Service SEO Company

Now what can be done to make the web pages faster? There can be a plethora of things for this like upgrading the RAM, the server, the hardware and so on. But the most notorious culprit in this case is the source code. The lack of optimised CSS for a majority of time is the reason for slow loading page load time.

Also Read: What’s Trending in Web Design: 2020 Highlights

To help you out here are some of the ways with the help of which you can optimise your website. Take a look.

• Find the Major Hindrances – The most essential thing with every kind of optimisation is getting started with a thorough audit. Thankfully, there are a plethora of CSS diagnostic tools that can assist you to find the performance hindrances. In order to know how fast the asset loads you should use the DevTools in your web browser.

In case of most of the browsers, just pressing the F12 button can help you to open DevTools. Through DevTools you can also see the external CSS like the Google Font Files. You can also check the CSS assets that is pulled from the third-party CDNs. This way you can find many sources that you never know existed.

• Use the Image Sprites – Using image sprites happens to be an old technique when it comes to reducing the CSS file size. This decreases the page load times. With this, you can package the pics in one .PNG file and that decreases the HTTP requests and improves the load time of pages. An image sprite is an ideal choice if you are using a lot of graphics and icons on the site.
• Compress or Minify the CSS Files – A majority of the websites rely on the multiple CSS files. In most cases the modular CSS is said to be the best practice. However, loading all these files can take up quite some time.

It is for this reason that CSS minification and compression tools exist. If you can utilise them in a smart way you can improve the page load times in a significant way. The online tools like CSS Minify can help you minify the CSS files.

• Go for the Big Wins – CSS may not always be the direct cause of problems in performance. But it can load assets that are heavy-hitting which are possible to be optimised within minutes. Examples –

1. Activate the HTTP/2 and GZIP compression on the server
2. Use CDN or Content Delivery Network for enhancing the number of simultaneous connections of HTTP and replicate the files to the other global locations
3. Get rid of files that are unused

• Split the CSS Files – You can split the CSS files into various stylesheets especially if you are targeting Chrome, IE or Firefox or multiple other browsers. Example: Instead of trying the hacks regarding the CSS in a stylesheet that is single, you can go with the conditional statements at IE for loading various stylesheets like for instance targeting IE6. While using Chrome you don’t need to load up and you can decrease the CSS file size to a great extent.

These are suggested by the experts of reputed web designing company who have been in the industry for quite some time now and know exactly what works and what doesn’t to help a business website achieve its true potential.