i'm trying to improve speed of my website. i'm using PageSpeed Insights to check my site performance and it was telling me to remove render blocking java script and css. so i did it and know its causing problem in my website design. so what should i do to remove rendering blocking without causing problem in my website design.
Render Blocking CSS
Render blocking CSS will always show on Google Page Speed Insights if you are using external resources for your CSS.
What you need to do is to inline all of your 'above the fold' styles in <style></style> tags in the head of your web page.
I will warn you, this is NOT easy and plugins that claim to do this often do not work, it requires effort.
To explain what is happening:-
A user navigates to your site and the HTML starts downloading.
As the HTML downloads the browser is trying to work out how to render that HTML correctly and it expects styling on those elements.
Once the HTML has downloaded if it hasn't found styles for the elements that appear above the fold (the initial part of the visible page) then it cannot render anything yet.
The browser looks for your style sheets and once they have downloaded it can render the page.
Point 4. is the render blocking as those resources are stopping the page from rendering the initial view.
To achieve this you need to work out every element that displays without scrolling the page and then find all the styles associated with those elements and inline them.
Render Blocking JS
This one is simpler to fix.
If you are able to use the async attribute on your external JS then use that.
However be warned that in a lot of cases this will break your site if you have not designed for it in the first place.
This is because async will download and execute your JS files as fast as possible. If a script requires another script to function (i.e. you are using jQuery) then if it loads before the other script it will throw an error. (i.e. your main.js file uses jQuery but downloads before it. You call $('#element') and you get a $ is undefined error as jQuery is not downloaded yet.)
The better tag to use if you do not have the knowledge required to implement async without error is to use the defer attribute instead.
This will not start downloading the script until the HTML has finished parsing. However it will still download and execute scripts in the order specified in the HTML.
Add async in the script tag and put the css and js in the last of the page
I have a site that has multiple pages. The first page is just a listview with icons and links to the other pages. CSS stylesheets work fine on the first page, but when I go to one of the linked pages, my custom css stylesheet (and js for that matter), related to that page, is being ignored. If I look in the FF inspector I see that it has dropped the associated lines that tell it about my stylesheet. If I directly go to the desired page or if I hit refresh, the styles look fine, but whenever I come from a link off the first page, the styles are gone. I see no errors when loading the page. Is this a know issue? How can I force it to not ignore my stylesheets.
I am using jquery mobile 1.4.5 in addition to my own.
Looking further. It looks like hitting the link is appending the body of the 2nd page at the end of the first and not simply loading the 2nd page.
It turns out that by default links behave a little different than normal when using jQuery Mobile. The don't do a full page load, but instead only inject the part contained in a div marked with data-role="page". I did not know this.
http://demos.jquerymobile.com/1.1.1/docs/pages/page-links.html
I've been using Google PageSpeed insights to try and improve my site's performance, and so far it's proven extremely successful. Things like deferring scripts worked beautifully, since I already had an in-house version of jQuery's .ready() to defer scripts until the page had loaded fully, all I had to do was inline that particular function and move the full scripts to the end of the page. That worked great.
But now I find myself glaring at the one remaining yellow dot on the checklist: "Eliminate render-blocking CSS in above-the-fold content".
The way my CSS is set up is to have one global _.css file containing styles that apply to the page structure in general, or are used in more than one or two places across the site. Most pages then have an associated CSS file (for instance, party.php has party.css) containing styles specific to that particular page. All CSS files are cached indefinitely, as I append /t=FILEMTIME to filenames (and later remove them with .htaccess) in order to guarantee that files are updated when they are changed.
So anyway, Google recommends inlining critical styles needed for above-the-fold content. Trouble is... well, take a look at this screenshot: http://prntscr.com/1qt49e
As you can see... ALL of the content is above-the-fold! People hate scrolling, especially on a game that involves loading many pages. So I designed the site to fit on one screen (assuming a good enough resolution). So that means... ALL of the styles apply to above-the-fold content! So... is there any solution? Or am I stuck with that yellow mark on an otherwise near-perfect score?
A related question has been asked before: What is “above-the-fold content” in Google Pagespeed?
Firstly you have to notice that this is all about 'mobile pages'.
So when I interpreted your question and screenshot correctly, then this is not for your site!
On the contrary - doing some of the things advised by Google in their guidelines will things make worse than better for 'normal' websites.
And not everything that comes from Google is the "holy grail" just because it comes from Google. And they themselves are not a good role model if you have a look at their HTML markup.
The best advice I could give you is:
Set width and height on replaced elements in your CSS, so that the browser can layout the elements and doesn't have to wait for the replaced content!
Additionally why do you use different CSS files, rather than just one?
The additional request is worse than the small amount of data volume. And after the first request the CSS file is cached anyway.
The things one should always take care of are:
reduce the number of requests as much as possible
keep your overall page weight as low as possible
And don't puzzle your brain about how to get 100% of Google's PageSpeed Insights tool ...! ;-)
Addition 1: Here is the page on which Google shows us, what they recommend for Optimize CSS Delivery.
As said before, I don't think that this is neither realistic nor that it makes sense for a "normal" website! Because mainly when you have a responsive web design it is most certain that you use media queries and other layout styles. So if you are not gonna load your CSS first and in a blocking manner you'll get a FOUT (Flash Of Unstyled Text). I really do not believe that this is "better" than at least some more milliseconds to render the page!
Imho Google is starting a new "hype" (when I have a look at all the question about it here on Stackoverflow) ...!
How I got a 99/100 on Google Page Speed (for mobile)
TLDR: Compress and embed your entire css script between your <style></style> tags.
I've been chasing down that elusive 100/100 score for about a week now. Like you, the last remaining item was was eliminating "render-blocking css for above the fold content."
Surely there is an easy solve?? Nope. I tried out Filament group's loadCSS solution. Too much .js for my liking.
What about async attributes for css (like js)? They don't exist.
I was ready to give up. Then it dawned on me. If linking the script was blocking the render, what if I instead embedded my entire css in the head instead. That way there was nothing to block.
It seemed absolutely WRONG to embed 1263 lines of CSS in my style tag. But I gave it a whirl. I compressed it (and prefixed it) first using:
postcss -u autoprefixer --autoprefixer.browsers 'last 2 versions' -u cssnano --cssnano.autoprefixer false *.css -d min/ See the NPM postcss package.
Now it was just one LONG line of space-less css. I plopped the css in <style>your;great-wall-of-china-long;css;here</style> tags on my home page. Then I re-analyzed with page speed insights.
I went from 90/100 to 99/100 on mobile!!!
This goes against everything in me (and probably you). But it SOLVED the problem. I'm just using it on my home page for now and including the compressed css programmatically via a PHP include.
YMMV (your mileage may vary) pending on the length of your css. Google may ding you for too much above the fold content. But don't assume; test!
Notes
I'm only doing this on my home page for now so people get a FAST render on my most important page.
Your css won't get cached. I'm not too worried though. The second they hit another page on my site, the .css will get cached (see Note 1).
Few tips that may help:
I came across this article in CSS optimization yesterday:
CSS profiling for ... optimization
A lot of useful info on CSS and what CSS causes the most performance drains.
I saw the following presentation on jQueryUK on "hidden secrets" in Googe Chrome (Canary) Dev Tools:
DevTools Can do that.
Check out the sections on Time to First Paint, repaints and costly CSS.
Also, if you are using a loader like requireJS you could have a look at one of the CSS loader plugins, called require-CSS, which uses CSSO - a optimzer that also does structural optimization, eg. merging blocks with identical properties. I used it a few times and it can save quite a lot of CSS from case to case.
Off the question:
I second #Enzino in creating a sprite for all the small icons you are loading. The file sizes are so small it does not really warrant a server roundtrip for each icon. Also keep in mind the total number of concurrent http requests are browser can do. So requests for a larger number of small icons are "render-blocking" as well. Although an empty page compare to yours, I like how duckduckgo loads for example.
Please have a look on the following page https://varvy.com/pagespeed/render-blocking-css.html .
This helped me to get rid of "Render Blocking CSS". I used the following code in order to remove "Render Blocking CSS". Now in google page speed insight I am not getting issue related with render blocking css.
<!-- loadCSS -->
<script src="https://cdn.rawgit.com/filamentgroup/loadCSS/6b637fe0/src/cssrelpreload.js"></script>
<script src="https://cdn.rawgit.com/filamentgroup/loadCSS/6b637fe0/src/loadCSS.js"></script>
<script src="https://cdn.rawgit.com/filamentgroup/loadCSS/6b637fe0/src/onloadCSS.js"></script>
<script>
/*!
loadCSS: load a CSS file asynchronously.
*/
function loadCSS(href){
var ss = window.document.createElement('link'),
ref = window.document.getElementsByTagName('head')[0];
ss.rel = 'stylesheet';
ss.href = href;
// temporarily, set media to something non-matching to ensure it'll
// fetch without blocking render
ss.media = 'only x';
ref.parentNode.insertBefore(ss, ref);
setTimeout( function(){
// set media back to `all` so that the stylesheet applies once it loads
ss.media = 'all';
},0);
}
loadCSS('styles.css');
</script>
<noscript>
<!-- Let's not assume anything -->
<link rel="stylesheet" href="styles.css">
</noscript>
I too have struggled with this new pagespeed metric.
Although I have found no practical way to get my score back up to %100 there are a few things I have found helpful.
Combining all css into one file helped a lot. All my sites are back up to %95 - %98.
The only other thing I could think of was to inline all the necessary css (which appears to be most of it - at least for my pages) on the first page to get the sweet high score. Although it may help your speed score this will probably make your page load slower though.
The 2019 optimal solution for this is HTTP/2 Server Push.
You do not need any hacky javascript solutions or inline styles. However, you do need a server that supports HTTP 2.0 (any modern server version will), which itself requires your server to run SSL. However, with Let's Encrypt there's no reason not to be using SSL anyway.
My site https://r.je/ has a 100/100 score for both mobile and desktop.
The reason for these errors is that the browser gets the HTML, then has to wait for the CSS to be downloaded before the page can be rendered. Using HTTP2 you can send both the HTML and the CSS at the same time.
You can use HTTP/2 push by setting the Link header.
Apache example (.htaccess):
Header add Link "</style.css>; as=style; rel=preload, </font.css>; as=style; rel=preload"
For NGINX you can add the header to your location tag in the server configuration:
location = / {
add_header Link "</style.css>; as=style; rel=preload, </font.css>; as=style; rel=preload";
}
With this header set, the browser receives the HTML and CSS at the same time which stops the CSS from blocking rendering.
You will want to tweak it so that the CSS is only sent on the first request, but the Link header is the most complete and least hacky solution to "Eliminate Render Blocking Javascript and CSS"
For a detailed discussion, take a look at my post here: Eliminate Render Blocking CSS using HTTP/2 Push
Consider using a package to automatically generate inline styles from your css files. A good one is Grunt Critical or Critical css for Laravel.
I am making a sub site, I would like a new CSS sheet thats cut down to just what that page needs.
What I would ideally like is a firefox extension that shows the CSS used on a currently viewed page, but not the CSS unused on that page.
Is this possible?
What I would ideally like is a firefox
extension that shows the CSS used on a
currently viewed page, but not the
CSS unused on that page.
To see unused CSS, you can use the Dust Me Selectors addon of firefox.
It extracts all the selectors from all
the stylesheets on the page you're
viewing, then analyzes that page to
see which of those selectors are not
used. The data is then stored so that
when testing subsequent pages,
selectors can be crossed off the list
as they're encountered.
You can test pages individually, or
spider an entire site, and you'll end
up with a profile of which selectors
are not used anywhere.
Due to network or some other reasons, some sites do not have their css files loaded and you will see unformatted/un-layout-ed ugly page.
It happened to pages I did before also. Kind of beyond control from a developer/design point of view.
I'm thinking of something like this place at the top of the page and obvious:
/*.... header and stuff */
<body>
<h2 id="hiddennote">If you do not see this page properly, please refresh</h2>
/*.... rest of the page .... */
The external stylesheet have a definition like this:
/* other styles defined */
#hiddennote {display: none;}
Functionally I know it'll work. Any drawbacks?
Another potential drawback is that it depends on the user knowing what the page is supposed to look like. You could fix that by changing the language of the message to something like, "This page is not displaying properly! While you are free to use the content below, you may want to refresh your browser to try loading the layout and styling information." You could also include a screenshot, assuming your images are not hosted on the same troublesome network.
The obvious drawback is if the page fails to load the CSS the second time.