critters VS purgecss

I'm interested in the notion of identifying "critical" CSS that should be inlined rather than live in its own stylesheet.

I was hoping there was some principled way of identifying critical and non-critical CSS (e.g. user interaction effects like :hover would always be considered non-critical), but it looks like the library it's using just tries to render your page and do a best-effort detection on which rules are considered critical, which is a little unsatisfying: https://github.com/GoogleChromeLabs/critters

https://github.com/GoogleChromeLabs/critters Might be a good starting point. It’s designed to inline the css afterward so it’s more focused on extracting used css than removing unused.

With the Pages dir, we had experimental support for critters. That was good enough for me

Critters does something similar but it is intended to inline only the CSS that is visible upon the page load (top of the page). There is also a Vite plugin that inlines everything that is possible to inline

// nuxt.config.js import { defineNuxtConfig } from 'nuxt' export default defineNuxtConfig({ modules: ['@nuxtjs/critters'], critters: { // Options passed directly to critters: https://github.com/GoogleChromeLabs/critters#critters-2 config: { // Default: 'media' preload: 'swap', }, }, })

I find critters[0] quite easy to work with and well worth implementing on my nextjs or Astro projects.

I build a lot of landing pages so there are very few multi page visits.

[0] https://github.com/GoogleChromeLabs/critters

Doesn't critters do this already? https://github.com/GoogleChromeLabs/critters I could be wrong though

As a starting point, Tailwind used to use PurgeCSS [0] but I'm not sure what they use now.

[0] https://purgecss.com

A similar question was already posted here but, I think looking at the raw html, we will be able to better determine the required css than what Purgecss does.

PurgeCss

Webpack minifies JS and CSS files by default when we build them in production mode. But it does not remove useless styles or classes. For this, you can use libraries like https://purgecss.com/ Do not forget to check the dependency, connect only the functionality that you use.

When I searched online I couldn't find an "industry standard" solution to this problem. What I ended up doing was using the popular tool PurgeCSS along with a quick Python script to generate the appropriate command. What the PurgeCSS tool does is search for all your HTML files, gather all the CSS classes used, and then "purge" all the unused ones from the CSS file. You just need to declare all the HTML files you have.

Skeleventy gives you a rock-solid foundation to build fast and accessible static websites, with clean, understated design. Features include a minimal build pipeline with Laravel Mix, the Sass-powered utility class generator Gorko, Purge CSS, an HTML minifier, SEO-friendly page metadata, image lazy loading, responsive navigation, and an XML sitemap.

You could look into using PurgeCSS and its cli?

Unable to get rid of unused styles. Importing components individually and setting styles in SASS can greatly simplify builds, but several common unused styles can't be deleted using PurgeCSS and analogues due to dynamic class names.

If you’re hand-crafting your CSS, using only the exact classes you need, you’ll still probably find that your CSS file size grows as your site does. But it doesn’t need to grow too much — you can remove unused classes with tools like Purge CSS .