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Critical CSS

(critical-css-extractor.kigo.studio)
234 points stevenpotts | 1 comments | 06 May 25 03:13 UTC | HN request time: 0.247s | source
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oneeyedpigeon ◴[06 May 25 09:05 UTC] No.43903048[source]▶
Feels like premature optimisation to me. Are there really cases where the CSS is so complex or the page loads so many resources that this effort is worthwhile? Maybe with the most complex web apps, I guess, but for almost all cases, I would have thought writing clean CSS, HTML, and JavaScript would render this unnecessary or even counterproductive.
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1. acjohnson55 ◴[06 May 25 18:13 UTC] No.43908043[source]▶
For many sites, this probably is a premature optimization. But for sites that live off of click-through, like news/media, getting the text on screen is critical. Bounce rate starts to go up and ad revenue drops as soon as page loads are less than "immediate", which is about 1 second. The full page can actually be quite heavy once all the ads, scripts, and media load.

We were doing this optimization more than a decade ago when I worked at HuffPost.