A slow-loading website is detrimental to your business and brand in general, as it can delay visitors. Fortunately, there are many things you can do to increase the loading speed of your website. To begin with, website owners should test their websites by: GTmetric, pingdomor Google PageSpeed Insights and use their results as suggestions for improvement. We’ve also addressed some website slowdown issues, such as removing render-blocking resources and minifying Javascript and CSS files. Now, we’ll look at how to combine external CSS in WordPress and explain why you should do it.
Why do you need to combine external CSS in WordPress?
Before a website can complete its creation, there are numerous assets that must be loaded, including images, CSS and JS files, and videos. While having a CDN (content delivery network) to load these assets can help speed up your website in general, it can have the opposite effect with CSS files. Having a large number of CSS files hosted on the CDN can significantly increase load times as they must be uploaded separately. To overcome this load time issue, you need to combine all your external CSS files into one file to reduce the number of HTTP requests.
Please note that these issues occur only for users whose hosting supports the HTTP/1.1 protocol. Those using the HTTP/2 protocol should not experience the same problem, as HTTP/2 allows multiple CSS files to be loaded in parallel. That said, let’s explain how external CSS can be combined.
How to combine external CSS in WordPress
The easiest way to combine external CSS in WordPress is to use a WordPress plugin. The most useful ones are caching plugins and/or plugins to improve website performance. An example that falls into both categories and can combine CSS files is the Autoptimize plugin.
auto optimize
auto optimize overall it is a great plugin for optimizing your website. Extremely useful for collecting and minifying JS and CSS files, deferring CSS or asynchronizing uncollected JS, optimizing images and Google fonts, and much more. Since aggregation is a different term for combining, this plugin is a great solution for combining external CSS.
To combine external CSS using Autoptimize, you must first install and activate the plugin. At that time, Go to Settings > Auto-Optimize and scroll down CSS Options subsection. simply tick the checkbox next to Optimize CSS Code? choice. By doing this, a number of options will become available to you. The first two of these options—combine CSS files and also collect inline CSS—will be checked.
Keep these options checked and continue saving changes. Scroll down Various Options and Press Save Changes and Empty Cache button. And the plugin does the rest. Once done, your CSS files will be merged and your load time in HTTP/1.1 will be improved.
final thoughts
Having a large number of CSS files hosted on a CDN can negatively impact a website’s load time. Fortunately, this problem is very easy to fix; you just need to combine your external CSS. And if you follow our advice and install the Autoptimize plugin, the solution will be an instant job. Make sure to adjust the options we mentioned and continue to enjoy your new, faster load times.
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