The guiding principle of WordPress is that the internet is for everyone and anyone can make a website even without coding knowledge. And that’s right – you need exactly zero coding knowledge building a website, but that means relying on someone else’s coding.
The pitfalls are obvious: Your website can contain code, often in CSS, without actually needing it to work. This training How to remove unused CSS from your WordPress website. But what is CSS? Why does your website have code it doesn’t need? If the code doesn’t do anything, why don’t you just drop it? We will try to answer these questions and more. Here’s what we’ll talk about:
CSS stands for cascading style sheets. It a set of instructions for a browser that determines how a web page appears to users. A web page is structured using a markup language such as HTML, but HTML is not user-readable. A web browser reads HTML and presents the content to a user in human-readable form.
However, a browser’s default interpretation of marked text creates many indistinguishable pages, and that’s where CSS comes into play. CSS has many uses: changing font size, colors and type, changing line breaks and paragraph spacing, adding and changing background images, and much more.
There are many ways that redundant code can end up on your website. As far as CSS is concerned, probably something you uploaded On your WordPress website, which affects the way it is presented to the user. For example, a theme has its own CSS, making your website different from others, not using the same theme. a plugin like a page builder can have its own CSSfonts, icon fonts, and many other pieces of software you can install.
But what’s the harm, we hear you ask. As a result, your website loads a lot of files that don’t need to work, which means your load time is unnecessarily long. Slow loading times it doesn’t just affect your visitors’ user experience – search engines take into account bounce rates (how quickly a user “give up” from your website) and load time.
And while CSS files tend to be small, any website can have a lot of them. That’s why there is no such thing as harmless useless code.
It’s relatively easy to determine if a website is suffering from unused CSS issues: Google has a dedicated tool for that. You can use Google PageSpeed Insights to determine if your website is suffering from unnecessary slowdowns and see how many of them can be attributed to unused CSS.
We ran the test on a website that obviously had many issues. You can expand the results to delete unused CSS to see Google’s recommendations.
Obviously, this only works for Google’s benchmarks. However, although the algorithms of all search engines are different, they tend to work similarly. Also, slow load times are slow load times no matter how you cut it, and no one wants that.
The challenge is knowing which CSS is useless. Reply? You don’t need to know this yourself. You can and should trust someone else’s code again. In this case, it is a plugin: Asset Cleanup.
First, install and activate the plugin. You will be immediately redirected to the add-on. While starting screen. To start removing unused CSS Settings from the menu on the right
To test different settings without affecting website visitors, you need to enable the plugin’s test mode. To do this, test mode go to tab and slide the slider and click Update All Settings.
Now, this plugin has many options and settings. We will focus on removing unused CSS. To do this we need CSS and JS Manager settings. will open on Home page bottom tab. This is where you can see which files have been uploaded to your website’s home page.
By scrolling down the list, you can see each of these files along with a lot of related data such as its source, location, file size and the rest. Also a Flyuseful hint on whether a piece of code is required on the page.
In the case of Contact Form 7for example, you can see that the file is about a form. The suggestion is that the file Home page if there is no form on it. The same is true for all other pages that don’t use forms.
Discharge Contact Form 7‘s CSS Home pageenable the slider and update.
And it’s that simple: You’ve made your website load a little faster by removing unused CSS.
The problem is you have to do all this for all posts and pages as well. For example, to load a list of CSS for a post to mail Go to tab and search for it in the search field and select a post from the list.
Once you’re happy with the CSS you removed, test if everything loads properly and you’re done. You can do then turn off test modeto ensure that the settings apply to all users, not just logged-in administrators.
As a result
As you can see, there are good reasons to be sure if your website is suffering from unused CSS. It takes some work to remove all unused CSS from your website, especially if it contains a large number of pages, but the results are worth it – while your visitors will appreciate faster load times, search engines won’t penalize you for slowness and bounce rate, leading to more potential visitors.
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