Blog Tricks

How to remove unused CSS to reduce Web page size

Remove Unused CSS

CSS stands for Cascading Style sheet and is used by web pages to help keep the information in the proper display format. It is generally a plain text file used for formatting content on WebPages.

Style sheets describe how documents are presented on-screen or perhaps how they are pronounced. The CSS files may have several redundant rules that are no longer used by any element of the web pages.

These unused entries in your CSS files increase the page load time and affect the performance of your browser. If these are not removed, then the browser has to work more resulting in inconvenience and disruption. If the files are kept perfectly and well structured and its performance became more smooth and unruffled.

In simple words, if you want to remove that search box, the styles may continue to exist in your CSS though they aren’t being used anywhere. In order speed up your blog, we share best two easy and free methods to remove unused CSS from style sheet.

Best two methods to remove unused CSS from style sheet

Google chrome has “developer Tools” that are built inside browsers and used to scan CSS sheets. You do not have to install any add-ons as it is built inside the Google browser itself offers the option. For that, Open you website in Google Chrome, and select the “tools” option and click on the “Developer Tools”.

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A new window will be displayed at the bottom of the page, click “Audit” option and then select “web page performance” option. After this, Click “ reload page and Audit on load”.

Remove unused CSS using Google Developer tool

Press “ Run ” tab to scan for CSS audit process.

In the other page,  Expand or dropdown the option “ Unused CSS Rules ”

You will see a systematically arranged index or list of all the styles explicated in the CSS file but they are not used anywhere on the contemporary webpage.

Copy these results in a text file or save it. Ignore the social plug-in as you have nothing to do with them. This step will be repeated for other pages on the sites. A count of several selectors into the amalgamated resultants maybe by using “Google Sheets” can be found. The selectors with commendatory count can be removed safely.

Remove Unused CSS using Dust Me

Opera and Firefox browsers use Add-on known as Dust Me to scan the page to remove unused CSS and reduce the size of style sheets. This way it scans the current Web Page and lists all the unused CSS rules that are defined in the style sheets but are not being used by the page.

To remove unused CSS, you can download and install Dust Me add-on directly from your browser and check your Web page style sheet. Dust Me can automatically scan your current web page and it supports all type of CSS including CSS3 selectors and you can also export the data into CSV and JSON format.

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