Mind that age! This blog post is 7 years old! Most likely, its content is outdated. Especially if it's technical.

This personal blog site of mine uses django-fancy-cache and mincss.



What that means is that I can cache the whole output of every blog post for weeks and when I do that I can first preprocess the HTML and convert every external CSS into one inline STYLE block which will only reference selectors that are actually used.



To see it in action, right-click and select "View Page Source". You'll see something like this:



/* Stats about using github.com/peterbe/mincss ------------------------------------------- Requests: 1 (now: 0) Before: 81Kb After: 11Kb After (minified): 11Kb Saving: 70Kb */ section{display:block}html{font-size:100%;-webkit-text-size-adjust:100%;-ms-tex...

The reason the saving is so huge, in my case, is because I'm using Twitter Bootstrap CSS framework which is awesome but as any framework, it will inevitably contain a bunch of stuff that I don't use. Some stuff I don't use on any page at all. Some stuff is used only on some pages and some other stuff is used only on some other pages.



What I gain by this, is faster page loads. What the browser does is that it, gets a URL, downloads all HTML, opens the HTML to look for referenced CSS (using the link tag) and downloads that too. Once all of that is downloaded, it starts to render the page. Approximately after that it starts to download all referenced Javascript and starts evaluating and executing that.

By not having to download the CSS the browser has one less thing to do. Only one request? Well, that request might be on a CDN (not a great idea actually) so even though it's just 1 request it will involve another DNS look-up.



Here's what the loading of the homepage looks like in Firefox from a US east coast IP.



Granted, a downloaded CSS file can be cached by the browser and used for other pages under the same domain. But, on my blog the bounce rate is about 90%. That doesn't necessarily mean that visitors leave as soon as they arrived, but it does mean that they generally just read one page and then leave. For those 10% of visitors who visit more than one page will have to download the same chunk of CSS more than once. But mind you, it's not always the same chunk of CSS because it's different for different pages. And the amount of CSS that is now in-line only adds about 2-3Kb on the HTML load when sent gzipped.



Getting to this point wasn't easy because I first had to develop mincss and django-fancy-cache and integrate it all. However, what this means is that you can have it done on your site too! All the code is Open Source and it's all Python and Django which are very popular tools.



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