Critical CSS? Not So Fast

This page summarizes the projects mentioned and recommended in the original post on news.ycombinator.com

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  • critical

    Extract & Inline Critical-path CSS in HTML pages

    I am a fan of CSSWizardry and yet I find this post misleading. The examples shown are ways NOT to do frontend performance engineering.

    The current best performant way to load JS is asynchronously as documented at https://web.dev/efficiently-load-third-party-javascript/.

    And the best way to load CSS is with Critical Path CSS + Async CSS as documented at https://web.dev/defer-non-critical-css/.

    The easiest way to generate Critical CSS is https://github.com/addyosmani/critical where you may suggest multiple resolutions.

    I have found https://github.com/addyosmani/critical-path-css-tools to be a great resource to master critical path CSS which improves page render speeds. It helps build fast rendering sites, sometimes even sub-second renders given you have a low latency backend.

  • critical-path-css-tools

    Tools to prioritize above-the-fold (critical-path) CSS

    I am a fan of CSSWizardry and yet I find this post misleading. The examples shown are ways NOT to do frontend performance engineering.

    The current best performant way to load JS is asynchronously as documented at https://web.dev/efficiently-load-third-party-javascript/.

    And the best way to load CSS is with Critical Path CSS + Async CSS as documented at https://web.dev/defer-non-critical-css/.

    The easiest way to generate Critical CSS is https://github.com/addyosmani/critical where you may suggest multiple resolutions.

    I have found https://github.com/addyosmani/critical-path-css-tools to be a great resource to master critical path CSS which improves page render speeds. It helps build fast rendering sites, sometimes even sub-second renders given you have a low latency backend.

  • Appwrite

    Appwrite - The open-source backend cloud platform. Add Auth, Databases, Functions, and Storage to your product and build any application at any scale while using your preferred coding languages and tools.

  • critters

    🦔 A Webpack plugin to inline your critical CSS and lazy-load the rest.

    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

  • styled-system

    ⬢ Style props for rapid UI development

    I'm a huge fain of Tailwind but if you're using react you can also consider styled-system:

    https://styled-system.com

    It seems to have a lot of the benefits of Tailwind but better integration with Typescript.

  • penthouse

    Generate critical css for your web pages

    It is easy with a little automation :). In the build process, adding a step to calculate critical path css helps. This should probably be the last step and run on production post deploy. The calculated CSS is stored in redis which will be appended in the head for subsequent requests. This tool had inspired me to build this process at multiple orgs I have worked with https://github.com/pocketjoso/penthouse.

    Agree on the async JS part but I guess browser makers will solve it soon.

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    Learn any GitHub repo in 59 seconds. Onboard AI learns any GitHub repo in minutes and lets you chat with it to locate functionality, understand different parts, and generate new code. Use it for free at www.getonboard.dev.

NOTE: The number of mentions on this list indicates mentions on common posts plus user suggested alternatives. Hence, a higher number means a more popular project.

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