Simplify Your Code: How to Remove Unused CSS with PurgeCSS

Optimize Your Website’s Performance with PurgeCSS

Are you tired of dealing with bloated CSS files that slow down your website’s performance? Do you struggle to remove unused CSS code from your project? Look no further! In this article, we’ll explore PurgeCSS, a powerful tool that helps you optimize your website’s performance by removing unnecessary CSS code.

The Problem of Unused CSS

When using CSS frameworks like Tailwind CSS and Bootstrap, it’s common to end up with unused CSS code in your project. This can lead to performance issues like longer page load times, making it frustrating for your users. For instance, Netflix Top 10 uses Tailwind on its entire website and only requires 6.5kB for the CSS file. Without removing unused CSS, the file size would be ten times larger!

What is PurgeCSS?

PurgeCSS is a tool designed to remove unused CSS code from your project. It’s particularly useful for optimizing your application for production. When you use CSS frameworks like Bulma, Bootstrap, or Tailwind, you’ll often find yourself with lots of unused CSS. PurgeCSS analyzes your content and CSS files to determine which styles are unused and removes them instantly.

Why Use PurgeCSS?

PurgeCSS stands out from other tools due to its modularity, ease of use, and wide range of customization options. Its modularity enables developers to create module extractors for specific use cases and frameworks. Additionally, PurgeCSS has a reliable default extractor that can work with a wide range of file types. With over 900k weekly downloads on npm and 7.4k GitHub stars, PurgeCSS is a popular choice among developers.

How Does PurgeCSS Work?

PurgeCSS works best for production builds, analyzing your content and CSS files to remove unused styles. During development, you may create unused styles, so it’s recommended to run PurgeCSS only for the production build. This way, you won’t have to recreate removed styles.

Using PurgeCSS with JavaScript Libraries/Frameworks

PurgeCSS is compatible with popular JavaScript libraries and frameworks like React, Vue, Gatsby, Next.js, and Nuxt.js. We’ll explore how to use PurgeCSS with React and Vue in this tutorial.

PurgeCSS with React

To use PurgeCSS with React, you’ll need to install PurgeCSS and its dependencies. Then, create a new JavaScript file and paste the code to remove unused styles. You can customize the behavior of PurgeCSS by adding options like --css and --content.

PurgeCSS with Vue.js

To use PurgeCSS with Vue.js, create a new Vue project and add PurgeCSS. Then, update your postcss.config.js file to configure PurgeCSS. You can customize the behavior of PurgeCSS by adding options like --css and --content.

Advanced Configuration Options

PurgeCSS offers several advanced configuration options to customize its behavior. These include:

• Keyframes and Fontfaces: You can set these options to true to remove unused font faces and keyframes code.
• Raw Content and CSS Values: You can directly pass in the value of both content and CSS without linking a file to it.
• Extractors: You can use custom extractors to get the list of selectors used in a file.
• Variables: You can set the variables option to true to remove unused CSS variables.
• Safelist and Comments: You can indicate which selectors are safe to leave in the final CSS using the safelist option or special CSS comments.

By using PurgeCSS, you can significantly reduce your website’s file size, improve performance, and provide a better user experience. Try it out today and see the difference for yourself!