I'm trying to improve my site speed as I integrate certain features of a theme I purchased into my site and came across this interesting feature on the website of said theme.
The problem I have now is my CSS style sheet is absolutely massive (220kb) and takes ages (3-4 seconds) to load. I'm working to reduce that, but that's a different story...
When I try to load that exact same page on the theme dev's website, it loads much faster. Upon inspection, on my website, I find my 'Size' and 'Content' amounts of the stylesheet in the dev tools is about identical.
On the developer's page, the size is much smaller than the content. Does this mean that ONLY the elements called upon in the HTML are downloaded from the stylesheet? If yes, how does one accomplish this, because it sounds tremendously efficient.
I also thought it was because the dev's page was caching the content on my browser but I've disabled cache and it still only loads a portion of the content.
My website's cache works by the way, I'm just interested in speeding up that initial load time.
Any thoughts?
Relevant imagery:
Cache Disabled:
Dev's website with small size/content ratio - http://i.imgur.com/B3uhOWF.png
My website with ~1:1 size/content ratio - http://i.imgur.com/Ymu2YRz.png
Off the top of my head, you could minify your CSS. There's a few free tools around including the Page Speed Insights for Chrome.
See https://developers.google.com/speed/docs/insights/MinifyResources
It looks like your CSS is already in a minified file, but perhaps the content isn't!
Just so people aren't confused. The solution was to enable gzip on the server, which you can read more about at https://developers.google.com/speed/articles/gzip (but still minify your css as well).
Thanks to user worldofjr, I found the answer to be ENABLE GZIP on the server.
Unbelievable increase in speed.
That should be required reading whenever someone signs up for webhosting. I can't believe my site has gone 1 year without this when it took 2 seconds to enable!!!
"On the developer's page, the size is much smaller than the content. Does this mean that ONLY the elements called upon in the HTML are downloaded from the stylesheet? If yes, how does one accomplish this, because it sounds tremendously efficient."
That's not generally how css works. And what you describe might not be very efficient even if you did somehow implement it. The server would have to know which styles to send, which would require the browser to load the page and send in it's list and the server would have to generate the custom css and send it back...
You certainly can limit which css loads where--and you should. But that has to be done manually, at least in my experience.
Anyway, a few things to consider before you proceed:
I think 200k is really, really big for a stylesheet. Most sites I work on the total CSS weight might be 20k. Or less. I'd investigate why yours is so huge. Maybe something has gone wrong. Minifying might help, but it isn't going to knock you down a whole order of magnitude.
However, even if it is the world's largest CSS file, 200k isn't THAT big. Not 4-5 seconds big. I'm working on a site right now where an entire page weighs ~350kb and I have it loading in under a second. Again, I suspect something else has gone wrong. The size of that CSS is probably indicative of something but I suspect it's not purely the time it takes the file to download.
Related
Of course the amount of HTML loaded all at once will affect speed. But will the overall amount of HTML on a website page affect performance speed?
If so, by how much? Will roughly 1,000 list items make a noticeable difference?
e.g.
I have a website that loads HTML per request and removes the previously loaded HTML. The user will sometimes go back and forth, which requires loading each time. Instead of reloading it each time, I'd like to just hide the loaded HTML and reshow it when they request it again.
Here's a link to an example on my website
Edit: For those that want to close this, this question falls under this topic.
a practical, answerable problem that is unique to software development
Yes, the amount of HTML effects page speed.
That's why many developers today are minifying their HTML as a part of the build process.
BUT, you better ask yourself not HOW MUCH HTML do you load, but WHAT KIND of HTML are you going to load.
for example: if you have 200 paragraph elements with lots of text it will be just fine. but what if you have 100 big IMG elements? in that case, maybe hiding them (but still loading them) is not such a good idea and its better to load them on demand.
I have built a site named http://typingtutorfree.com/. How do I minimize the CSS file size? It's taking so much time to load the site. Is there any other way to make it load faster? Please give me some solution to make my site load fast.
Your CSS takes about 200ms seconds to load, so the problem isn't located there. You have quite a lot of javascript/jquery files though (quick count: 35 of them), and you can minify those to speed up some things. You should also check if you really need all 35 of them, and remove those that you don't need.
You can minify JS files with a lot of tools (if you use dreamweaver or visual studio, there is a minifier included), or on the internet.
Google has a tool for this: http://closure-compiler.appspot.com/home Or you have other sites who offer the same service: example , another one, third example.
The last one also compresses your css, if you'd want that.
A last point of advice: check that error.wav file, because it takes quite a lot of time to load. See if you can't compress it in any way.
You can reduce the file size of your CSS files by removing unnecessary white-spaces, line breaks, indentations, comments, semicolons, quotes and by combining rules when possible.
I personally use an online tool like https://compresscss.net/ to make things easier.
Your first option would be to concatenate any CSS blocks you can. Duplicate styling will only cause the load speed to be longer.
If your CSS code is already as minimal as it can be, sites such as http://csscompressor.net/ can remove new-lines and other code formalities, making the output unreadable but considerably smaller.
Your website may be unable to distribute the CSS with speed due to the server's limitations on its up-link. There are many services out there such as CloudFlare which are able to cache a multitude of files, including CSS, and send it to the browser with much less loading times.
I'm testing a website speed using PageSpeed Insights tool.
In the result page, one of the warnings suggested me to reduce byte size of css, html and js files.
At the first I tried to remove comments, but nothing changed.
How can I do that?
Should I remove spaces and tabs?
It seems to be a very long operation, worth it?
The action of removing spaces, tabs and useless chars is called minify.
You don't need to do that, there are a lot of services that can minimize files for you.
for example:
http://www.willpeavy.com/minifier/
Be care if you have jquery code: sometimes it removes spaces in wrong place.
You have two things to do to reduce page size:
Minify CSS & JS files
In server side, if you are running your website via Apache, you can install APC, for page cahing. You'll have better parformances
APC
In addition to CSS minifier/prettifier tools above, I recommend using proCSSor for optimizing CSS files. It offers variety of advanced options.
Never found those tools to be much use beyond giving some tips for what might be slowing it down. Minifying is unlikely to achieve much. If you want to speed up your site, save the page and see what the largest files are. Generally they will be the image files rather than the code, and see if you can reduce these.
Also, try and test it on two servers - is your host slow?
If your html file is massive, that suggests a problem with the site's structure - it is rare that a page needs to be large.
Finally, large javascript files are most likely to be things like jquery. If Google hosts these, then use the hosted version. That way, it will probably be already in a user's cache and not impact on your loading time.
EDIT, after further testing and incorporating the issues discussed in the comments below:
PageSpeed Insights is an utterly amateurish tool, and there are much more effective ways to speed up the rendering time than minifying the codes.
PageSpeed Insights is an utterly amateurish tool, that as a matter of standard advises to reduce HTML, CSS and JS file sizes, if not minified. A much, much better tool is Pingdom Website Speed Test. That compares rendering speed to the average of the sites it is asked to test, and gives the download times of the site's components.
Just test www.gezondezorg.org on both, and see the enormous difference in test results. At which the Google tool is dead wrong. It advises to reduce the CSS and JS files, while its own figures (click the respective headers) show that doing so will reduce their sizes with 3.8 and 7.9 kB, respectively. That comes down to less than 1 millisecond download time difference! (1 millisecond = 1/1000 of a second; presumed broadband internet).
Also, it says that I did do a good thing: enable caching. That is BS as well, because my .htaccess file tells browsers to check for newly updated files at every visit, and refresh cached files whenever updated. Tests confirm that all browsers heed that command.
Furthermore, that site is not intended to be viewed on mobile phones. There is just way too much text on it for that. Nevertheless, PageSpeed Insights opens default with the results of testing against mobile-phone criteria.
More effective ways to speed up the rendering
So, minifying hardly does anything to speed up the rendering time. What does do that is the following:
Put your CSS codes and Javascripts as much as possible in one file each. That saves browser-to-server (BTS) requests. (Do keep in mind that quite a number of Javascripts need the DOM to be fully loaded first, so in practice it comes down to putting the scripts as much as possible in 2 files: a pre- and a post-body file.)
Optimize large images for the web. Photoshop and the likes even have a special function for that, reducing the file size while keeping the quality good enough for use on the web.
In case of images that serve as full-size background for containers: use image sprites. That saves BTS requests as well.
Code the HTML and JS files so that there is no rendering dependency on files from external domains, such as from Twitter, Facebook, Google Analytics, advertisement agencies, etc.
Make sure to get a web-host that will respond swiftly, has a sufficient processing capacity, and has a(n almost) 100% up-time.
Use vanilla/native JS as much as possible. Use jQuery or other libraries only for tasks that would otherwise be too difficult or too time-consuming. jQuery not only is an extra file to download, it is also processed slower than native JS.
Lastly, you should realize that:
having the server minify the codes on the fly generally results in a much slower response from the server;
minifying a code makes it unreadable;
de-minifying tools are notorious for their poor performance.
Minifying resources refers to eliminating unnecessary bytes, such as extra spaces, line breaks, and indentation. Compacting HTML, CSS, and JavaScript can speed up downloading, parsing, and execution time. In addition, for CSS and JavaScript, it is possible to further reduce the file size by renaming variable names as long as the HTML is updated appropriately to ensure the selectors continue working.
You can find plenty of online tools for this purpose, a few of them are below.
HTML Minify
CSS Minify
JS Minify
good luck!
With regards to mobile websites on smartphones;
Assuming that:
HTML code is rarely a huge amount of data
Compressed JS files are not so heavy
Images are often loaded via CSS (at least could always)
It's the same sequence (PHP + SQL = HTML) on server-side.
It seems way faster to do this way and quite easy to maintain.
And even if:
It's not graceful at all (hide Useless elements instead of generating a sharp and beautiful HTML code)
Useless code is loaded and treated.
Best practices for mobiles websites don't recommend to do this way.
Is it a good idea to rely only on different CSS to create a mobile version of a website? (Actually on different header templates, in order not to load useless JS)
It's probably a bad idea to serve HTML with elements that you know will be useless to your users.
Small amounts of kb make a difference on mobile download speed.
It means your CSS and Javscript need to be more complicated.
You users might see the content if the CSS or JS are slow loading.
It will take more processing power (I think CSS styles will still be applied to the hidden elements).
It's likely to be easier to manage on the server
But to answer the question "Is it a good idea to rely only on different CSS to create a mobile version of a website?";
Yes if you want your mobile users to have the same content as your large screen users. Which you probably should as this is normally what the users want.
No if you want to serve them different content.
Speaking for Belgium, I know a lot of people are still on Edge instead of 3G and loading a webpage takes some time. If we would have to load pages made your way, we would indeed be loading a lot of useless code, giving us quite a bad experience.
I'd suggest you stop being lazy and write your mobile websites the way they should be written. Think of your visitors and user experience; it honestly isn't that much of an effort.
I think you basically answered your own question already. Like BoltClock said, do what you want, but I sure wouldn't recommend doing things your way.
I have a more general design question relating to css and websites. I know that it is good computer science to normalize code as much as possible and avoid duplication. So it would stand to reason to me, at least in theory that one would do the same when organizing stylesheets for a website.
So when I started on my most recent website I started out with this same philosophy. It worked ok for my first few pages and while I was only testing in firefox...
However as my site grew and as I added pages, multiple layouts (and browsers) I found this philosophy broke down really quickly. Ultimately over time I have moved to the following approach:
I have a very limited top level css file for each master page layout in my site, it contains classes for well known styles across that layout as well as css for the master page.
I keep specific css styles for each page.
I keep specific css styles for embeddable page elements / controls
I ended up taking this route so that I could trust that changes on one page wouldn't accidentally break other pages in the site resulting in a lot of regression bugs.
What do other people do when approaching this? Is this a good / bad approach... I do see cons to this approach, some pages are very similar so making a significant change means changing more css code, I also feel that the pro's outweigh this on a daily basis.
What do other developers think about this philosophy? Good? Bad? Just curious really...
To me its one of those situations where I weighed the difference between my ideals (I try to keep very tight code), and the frustration of changing requirements on one page breaking 20 other pages because I changed a div width by a few pixels (upsetting a float on another page for instance).
Thanks for your input
Just like any other type of code, if you are duplicating your CSS code all over the place, you are asking for trouble. Maintenance is going to get harder and harder for you as time goes on.
The best way to not have issues with a change on one page affecting other pages detrimentally is to have a style guide that drives your UI layout and design. If your style guide defintes the HTML and CSS classes to use for a given design element, then they will all always be displayed the same across all pages. If a specific page's element needs to be changed, you change the HTML to use a different class and then build new CSS for that class (and add it to your style guide for reuse). The style guide also allows you to make sure that your HTML is uniform across all developers working on the site, which means even less of a chance of CSS changes causing problems as you do more development.
Another point you need to remember with CSS is that every one of those .css files you create and reference on a page is an HTTP request. If every page and control has its own CSS file, you are really hurting your users' experience on the site by bogging down the total request download time for every single page request. It also makes it less likely for their browser to cache the .css files because the cache has a limited amount of space, so if you keep filling it with more and more .css files, they are going to get dumped from the cache more quickly. Yes, you can combine .css files programmatically in a handler so your page only makes one request per page, but then you have additional server overhead and the caching issue still remains (unless you have a single request for all .css files on your site, which defeats the purpose of what you're trying to do here anyways).