Archana Nagarkar | 3 min read | Aug 11, 2020
1. Quickread
As you know Cascading style sheets, or CSS is a very important element of any website. CSS is the language used to define a website’s visual presentation based on the content provided in a markup language document. It is stored in the external style sheets, or .css files, but it also is integrated directly into HTML documents.
In this blog, you can get an idea, how CSS affects the website speed, how you can avoid CSS expressions.
What is CSS?
Cascading style sheets, or CSS, is the language used to define a website’s visual presentation based on the content provided in a markup language document. CSS is typically stored in external style sheets, or .css files, but it can also be integrated directly into HTML documents.
Using CSS you can separate the website’s presentation and content, so that your website can be accessible to different devices. CSS helps to keep separate information about colors and fonts from contents and reduce websites complexity. In any case, whenever utilized inappropriately, CSS can turn into a hindrance for your site’s presentation from the beginning.
2. CSS performance and website speed
There are a number of speed factors which need to be considered during website speed optimization. While analysing and evaluating the performance of website, there are a variety of performance metrics to measure, for instance:
- Time to first byte
- Time to start render
TTFB or Time to load first byte refers to how long it takes to receive the first byte after requesting your URL. The time to start render is the point at which the user’s browser actually begins displaying content. The former is largely dependent on your server setup, but the latter depends more on how your CSS is structured.
Browsers won’t begin rendering until they receive data, so a slow time to first byte will clearly push back your chance to start rendering. In this manner, you should resolve any possible issues with your server before you can receive the full benefits of enhancing your CSS execution.
3. Avoid CSS expressions to improve the site speed?
As you know CSS plays an important role to present site visualization. CSS expressions degrade rendering performance; replacing them with alternatives will improve browser rendering for IE users. In this blog, you can see how to avoid the CSS expressions so that it can help to improve your site speed.
CSS Expression is used to set the dynamic properties of dynamically changing documents in response to various events. Internet Explorer 5 introduced CSS expressions, or “dynamic properties”.They consist of JavaScript expressions embedded as the values of CSS properties in CSS declarations.