Reasons why you should minimize and compress your website’s CSS
Cascading Style sheets, or CSS, is a coding language for the different styles and fonts that are used on a webpage and throughout its content. Considered one of the “cornerstone technologies” of the web, CSS is typically stored in external stylesheets, or .css files, but it can also be integrated directly into HTML documents. The use of CSS makes websites easily accessible because it separates the web’s contents from its presentation. It also reduces the complexity of the website because it keeps information about fonts and colors separate from the main content. However, if used excessively, CSS can fast become a stumbling block for your website’s performance because of the length, detail and size of your CSS file. A large CSS file can cause excessive network traffic that provides no substantial benefit to you or your web server. In such cases, a website’s CSS can and should be minified. There’s a great free CSS minification development tool right here that we’ve added to our directory. Minification is the process of minimizing code and markup in your web pages and script files. It’s one of the main methods used to reduce load times and bandwidth usage on websites. Minification dramatically improves site speed and accessibility, directly translating into a better user experience. It’s also beneficial to users accessing your website through a limited data plan since they would likely save on their bandwidth usage while surfing the web.
1. Save Time
When you minify a website’s CSS, you reduce the file size by up to 30-50%, making it easier and more convenient for the browser to process and render it, thus saving up lag time and loading browser pages faster and with more accuracy.
2. Save Space
When a CSS file is minified, all the unnecessary characters are removed which include paces, commas, tabs, new lines etc. This considerably reduces the size of the file.
3. Easier development
When you store all of your style and layout rules for your web project into one CSS file, it makes creating new HTML pages and web page templates a lot easier, because all you have to do to make your page look pretty is reference the CSS style sheet in the header of your code. There are a lot of free CSS tools that can make minifying or beautifying your CSS very easy during your web development work.
4. Reach a wider audience
Minification is also responsible for improving site speed and accessibility which leads to a better user experience overall and can encourage web surfers to return to your website. This can help your ranking and SEO with Google and other search engines.
While using CSS for a website developing is one of the most useful tools nowadays, using it just a little more sensibly through minification can greatly affect the performance of your website which can have an overall greater impact on the image of your brand.
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