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Uncovering the Dark Side of WordPress: Unused CSS

What is Unused CSS in WordPress?

Why Remove Unused CSS?

How to Detect Unused CSS in WordPress?

How to Remove Unused CSS in WordPress?

Conclusion

Introduction:
WordPress, oh WordPress, the wonderland of website development and maintenance. With its abundance of user-friendly themes and plugins, creating and enhancing WordPress websites is easier than ever. However, with great ease comes great ignorance! A gloomy and obscure reality of unused CSS lurks behind every WordPress site, unknown to many developers and website owners. Unused CSS can slow down page loading and increase bounce rates. This article aims to shed light on the dark side of WordPress and how to spot and remove unused CSS from your website.

What is Unused CSS in WordPress?
Have you ever heard of Cascading Style Sheets (CSS)? It is a stylesheet language that adds style and format to HTML web pages. When you access a webpage, the browser loads all its HTML, CSS, and JavaScript files to render and display the content on the screen. When the CSS files are large and contain unnecessary CSS styles, the webpage loading speed decreases, thus degrading the user experience.

Unused CSS is CSS code that is not required or applied to the webpage but is still loaded by the browser. There are multiple reasons why this happens. Themes and plugins might have their CSS files with an excessive amount of insignificant styles that are not relevant to the website. Opportunistic designers might have customized the website design using CSS, but later found that some styles are no longer necessary. Thirdly, deleting a plugin or theme can also leave behind a plethora of unused CSS files.

Why Remove Unused CSS?
Unused CSS can have a larger impact on your WordPress website’s performance. It not only slows down page loading time and increases bounce rates, but also increases server load, leading to higher hosting costs. Moreover, it can negatively affect your website’s search engine optimization as search engines prioritize fast-loading websites. Therefore, removing unused CSS is important to enhance the performance of a WordPress website and provide a better user experience.

How to Detect Unused CSS in WordPress?
To remove unused CSS, you must first identify which CSS files, classes, and styles are surplus to requirements. Luckily, there are several tools available to help you identify unused CSS in your website. Using Google Chrome DevTools, you can audit your website and flag unused CSS styles. The Lighthouse open-source tool is also available to audit websites and generate a report on the unused CSS. Additionally, you can use PurifyCSS, a node module that analyzes your code and removes unused CSS styles, leaving optimized CSS files that contain only necessary styles.

How to Remove Unused CSS in WordPress?
After identifying unused CSS code, there are several ways to remove it. One way is to remove the unused CSS manually. This is done by opening the style.css file, finding the unnecessary CSS styles, and deleting them from the file. Alternatively, you can use a WordPress plugin, such as “WP Asset CleanUp,” which can quickly remove unused CSS and JavaScript files selectively. Lastly, creating a custom CSS file with only useful styles added will limit loading only necessary styles and prevent unused CSS.

Conclusion
As we’ve seen, unused CSS can unfavorably affect WordPress website performance by increasing page loading times, bounce rates, and hosting costs. By using available tools for identifying and removing unused CSS and opting for a more efficient approach to managing CSS on a WordPress site, site owners can significantly reduce performance degradation and enhance the user experience.