These days everybody is talking about the speed of the websites. So, what is this speed of a website? There are three kinds of speeds when it is come to websites. But among them css files optimization plays a huge role.
Loading Time
Loading time is the time that a website takes for all of the information to download to the device that the website user are using. Loading speed can be varied on the speed of the internet connection and the size of the files. To achieve the high loading speed, you can’t do a much about the internet connection, however you can reduce the size of your website files. And the speed can also vary depending on the devices. Now a days, it is important to have a good speed on desktops as well as on the mobiles, because for the new search engine optimization algorithms, website loading speed is a must. Therefore, if you want your website to be found on the first page of Google, You will definitely have to consider the speed optimization.
Processing Time
The second important thing when we talk about the speed is that the processing time. This means, the time taken to process and render all your downloaded web files by the browser. The processing and rendering mostly based on how well your code was written. In here the responsiveness of your website can be considered. To minimize the processing time, only thing that you need to do is control your own code properly, which means in other words you will have to think about minimizing your CSS files, JavaScript files and Html files.
Furthermore, make sure to use quality and high resolution images to get a decent quality after compressing.
Perceived Website Speed, or Perceived Performance
What this mean is, sometimes your website browsers can feel that the website look and feel like it is going slow or fast. So, you will have to study your customers and get the feedback from them about the speed of the website. If you want to have a fast loading website, you got lot to do. The bigger the website is, the more that you need to optimize.
Speed Up Your CSS
Most of the time, mainly the CSS file can slow down your website. Sometimes,
you have unnecessary CSS files in your website and it can affect file size.
There may be the matter of the way how fast your website can load and render
the website. Therefore, when optimizing a website to run faster, the CSS files
optimization is the best place to start. You can always use developer tools
from Google chrome to determine the unnecessary CSS files. You can always
remove CSS files from the header section of a webpage and call only required CSS files.
You take out some content and forget to delete the old CSS. You change some class or ID, and forget to delete the other CSS. So, if you forget to delete the old CSS rule once you add or modify, then unused code can be a problem in loading speed and rendering the website pages. As it will take more time to browser to look through all of the CSS files until it find the appropriate HTML code. Therefore, be careful and make sure to delete unused codes in your CSS files and other files.
On the other hand, there are some CSS properties that will take long time to render than other CSS properties. So, if you are using properties such as box-shadows and other advance features, your website will take some time to load. Try to use styles which will help to load the website fast.
One of the other things to slow down your website is CSS animations. Mostly, this will affect to the mobile layouts as the animation have to be rendered entirely by the browser itself. Normally, position, scale, rotation and opacity can be load faster. Keep in mind all those factors when designing a website and have it load faster.
To conclude, when you try to speed up the loading speed of the website, it is best to start with your CSS files optimization. Find all the unwanted style rules and delete them. Then, when designing the website, make sure not to use heavy styles or CSS properties which will take long time to render by the browser.
