Users can feel that something is occurring and that the page is still responsive by using visual effects. How do CSS loaders work to improve website performance?ĬSS loaders function by drawing the user’s focus elsewhere while a website is still loading. CSS loaders are designed to enhance user experience by letting users know when a website is active and not frozen.

They alert visitors that the page is still loading and ask them to be patient. Visual effects called CSS loaders are shown on a website while it loads.

What are CSS loaders and what do they do? While this library isn’t actively maintained anymore, the idea is the same, and in the end, this isn’t the solution we’re looking for.FAQs about CSS loaders 1. There are many tools out there that will analyze your code, and remove unused styles from a stylesheet. But what if we only need a few dozen at most? Surely we could trim out the unneeded stuff? First attempt using Purif圜SSįont Awesome’s main stylesheet contains definitions for literally thousands of icons. Consider that some of your users might be browsing your site on mobile, away from a strong or fast internet connection. While font files are not as expensive a resource for your browser to handle as JavaScript, those are still bytes your browser needs to pull down, just for some little icons. Unfortunately, when we peek into DevTool’s Font tab, things get a little worse. I’m importing the file Font Awesome provides.Īs we saw above, the gzipped file weighs in at 33.4KB, which isn’t bad at all. In other words, we want the slowest possible implementation with no optimization. We want to see what the most straightforward, least performant use of Font Awesome looks like. Now let’s see how many bytes our font files take to render all that. Here’s a look at DevTool’s Network tab to see what’s coming down. Here’s what our HTML file looks like in the browser before subsetting fonts: To get a reasonable sample of icons, I’ve listed out each one that I use on one of my side projects. Let’s set things upįor the sake of demonstration, I have nothing but an HTML file that imports Font Awesome’s base CSS file. As we go, I’ll assume you’re importing the CSS file Font Awesome provides, and using its web fonts to display icons. Let’s subset fonts together in a Font Awesome project to see the difference it makes. This will reduce the number of bytes transmitted over the wire, and improve performance. By subsetting Font Awesome, we can remove any unused glyphs from the font files it provides.

Unfortunately, it’s somewhat easy to use in a way that results in less-than-ideal performance. Font Awesome is an incredibly popular icon library.

Cool loading icons