How Many CSS Files Do You Need?
Writing by Nick Stamoulis on Wednesday, November 12, 2008 Leave a comment
Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) are great tools. You can eliminate a lot of wasteful code, which allows you to move real content closer to the top of the web page where search engines can spot it easily, crawl it, and ensure that your website gets a good index and ranking. But there is a drawback to having multiple CSS files. It will slow your website down.
I’ve seen CSS files for all sorts of things, even things for which they aren’t necessary. Like list items. Folks, there is no reason to put your list items in a CSS file all to themselves. Build a table if you must, but don’t put list items in a CSS file. Even if you use the same list on all of your pages. For one thing, there are search engine benefits to list items, if the search engines can crawl them. If you hide them away in an external file somewhere, the search engines won’t find them.
Even more importantly, if you must use CSS files for your design elements, put all of those elements into one CSS file. It will increase your load time tremendously. The reason is because when a browser starts reading your web page to show your website to a visitor, the browser pulls up each individual file separately and shows the contents of each CSS file only when it is necessary. If you have multiple CSS files then your site visitor’s browser will call them all up separately. That’s like calling 15 of your friends individually for a multi-party phone call when you could just have a conference call and log everyone in at the same time.
In short, lessen the number of your CSS files. Your load time will improve and that will translate into better search engine rankings.
Leave a comment Category: Content Development
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