Inlining critical CSS for first-time visits

After listening to Scott rave on about how much of a perceived-performance benefit he got from inlining critical CSS on first load, I thought I’d give it a shot over at The Session. On the chance that this might be useful for others, I figured I’d document what I did.

The idea here is that you can give a massive boost to the perceived performance of the first page load on a site by putting the most important CSS in the head of the page. Then you cache the full stylesheet. For subsequent visits you only ever use the external stylesheet. So if you’re squeamish at the thought of munging your CSS into your HTML (and that’s a perfectly reasonable reaction), don’t worry—this is a temporary workaround just for initial visits.

My particular technology stack here is using Grunt, Apache, and PHP with Twig templates. But I’m sure you can adapt this for other technology stacks: what’s important here isn’t the technology, it’s the thinking behind it. And anyway, the end user never sees any of those technologies: the end user gets HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. As long as that’s what you’re outputting, the specifics of the technology stack really don’t matter.

Generating the critical CSS

Okay. First question: how do you figure out which CSS is critical and which CSS can be deferred?

To help answer that, and automate the task of generating the critical CSS, Filament Group have made a Grunt task called grunt-criticalcss. I added that to my project and updated my Gruntfile accordingly:

grunt.initConfig({
    // All my existing Grunt configuration goes here.
    criticalcss: {
        dist: {
            options: {
                url: 'http://thesession.dev',
                width: 1024,
                height: 800,
                filename: '/path/to/main.css',
                outputfile: '/path/to/critical.css'
            }
        }
    }
});

I’m giving it the name of my locally-hosted version of the site and some parameters to judge which CSS to prioritise. Those parameters are viewport width and height. Now, that’s not a perfect way of judging which CSS matters most, but it’ll do.

Then I add it to the list of Grunt tasks:

// All my existing Grunt tasks go here.
grunt.loadNpmTasks('grunt-criticalcss');

grunt.registerTask('default', ['sass', etc., 'criticalcss']);

The end result is that I’ve got two CSS files: the full stylesheet (called something like main.css) and a stylesheet that only contains the critical styles (called critical.css).

Cache-busting CSS

Okay, this is a bit of a tangent but trust me, it’s going to be relevant…

Most of the time it’s a very good thing that browsers cache external CSS files. But if you’ve made a change to that CSS file, then that feature becomes a bug: you need some way of telling the browser that the CSS file has been updated. The simplest way to do this is to change the name of the file so that the browser sees it as a whole new asset to be cached.

You could use query strings to do this cache-busting but that has some issues. I use a little bit of Apache rewriting to get a similar effect. I point browsers to CSS files like this:

<link rel="stylesheet" href="/css/main.20150310.css">

Now, there isn’t actually a file named main.20150310.css, it’s just called main.css. To tell the server where the actual file is, I use this rewrite rule:

RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteRule ^(.+).(d+).(js|css)$ $1.$3 [L]

That tells the server to ignore those numbers in JavaScript and CSS file names, but the browser will still interpret it as a new file whenever I update that number. You can do that in a .htaccess file or directly in the Apache configuration.

Right. With that little detour out of the way, let’s get back to the issue of inlining critical CSS.

Differentiating repeat visits

That number that I’m putting into the filenames of my CSS is something I update in my Twig template, like this (although this is really something that a Grunt task could do, I guess):

{% set cssupdate = '20150310' %}

Then I can use it like this:

<link rel="stylesheet" href="/css/main.{{ cssupdate }}.css">

I can also use JavaScript to store that number in a cookie called csscached so I’ll know if the user has a cached version of this revision of the stylesheet:

<script>
document.cookie = 'csscached={{ cssupdate }};expires="Tue, 19 Jan 2038 03:14:07 GMT";path=/';
</script>

The absence or presence of that cookie is going to be what determines whether the user gets inlined critical CSS (a first-time visitor, or a visitor with an out-of-date cached stylesheet) or whether the user gets a good ol’ fashioned external stylesheet (a repeat visitor with an up-to-date version of the stylesheet in their cache).

Here are the steps I’m going through:

First of all, set the Twig cssupdate variable to the last revision of the CSS:

{% set cssupdate = '20150310' %}

Next, check to see if there’s a cookie called csscached that matches the value of the latest revision. If there is, great! This is a repeat visitor with an up-to-date cache. Give ‘em the external stylesheet:

{% if _cookie.csscached == cssupdate %}
<link rel="stylesheet" href="/css/main.{{ cssupdate }}.css">

If not, then dump the critical CSS straight into the head of the document:

{% else %}
<style>
{% include '/css/critical.css' %}
</style>

Now I still want to load the full stylesheet but I don’t want it to be a blocking request. I can do this using JavaScript. Once again it’s Filament Group to the rescue with their loadCSS script:

 <script>
    // include loadCSS here...
    loadCSS('/css/main.{{ cssupdate }}.css');

While I’m at it, I store the value of cssupdate in the csscached cookie:

    document.cookie = 'csscached={{ cssupdate }};expires="Tue, 19 Jan 2038 03:14:07 GMT";path=/';
</script>

Finally, consider the possibility that JavaScript isn’t available and link to the full CSS file inside a noscript element:

<noscript>
<link rel="stylesheet" href="/css/main.{{ cssupdate }}.css">
</noscript>
{% endif %}

And we’re done. Phew!

Here’s how it looks all together in my Twig template:

{% set cssupdate = '20150310' %}
{% if _cookie.csscached == cssupdate %}
<link rel="stylesheet" href="/css/main.{{ cssupdate }}.css">
{% else %}
<style>
{% include '/css/critical.css' %}
</style>
<script>
// include loadCSS here...
loadCSS('/css/main.{{ cssupdate }}.css');
document.cookie = 'csscached={{ cssupdate }};expires="Tue, 19 Jan 2038 03:14:07 GMT";path=/';
</script>
<noscript>
<link rel="stylesheet" href="/css/main.{{ cssupdate }}.css">
</noscript>
{% endif %}

You can see the production code from The Session in this gist. I’ve tweaked the loadCSS script slightly to match my preferred JavaScript style but otherwise, it’s doing exactly what I’ve outlined here.

The result

According to Google’s PageSpeed Insights, I done good.

The Simplest Way to Load CSS Asynchronously | Filament Group, Inc.

Scott re-examines the browser support for loading everything-but-the-critical-CSS asynchronously and finds that it might now be as straightforward as this one declaration:

<link rel="stylesheet" href="/path/to/my.css" media="print" onload="this.media='all'">

I love the fact the Filament Group are actively looking at how deprecate their loadCSS polyfill—exactly the right attitude for polyfills in general.

Inlining or Caching? Both Please! | Filament Group, Inc., Boston, MA

This just blew my mind! A fiendishly clever pattern that allows you to inline resources (like critical CSS) and cache that same content for later retrieval by a service worker.

Crazy clever!

CSS and Network Performance – CSS Wizardry

Harry takes a look at the performance implications of loading CSS. To be clear, this is not about the performance of CSS selectors or ordering (which really doesn’t make any difference at this point), but rather it’s about the different ways of getting rid of as much render-blocking CSS as possible.

…a good rule of thumb to remember is that your page will only render as quickly as your slowest stylesheet.

Smaller, Faster Websites - - Bocoup

The transcript of a great talk by Wilto, focusing on responsive images, inlining critical CSS, and webfont loading.

When we present users with a slow website, a loading spinner, laggy webfonts—or tell them outright that they‘re not using a website the right way—we’re breaking the fourth wall. We’ve gone so far as to invent an arbitary line between “webapp” and “website” so we could justify these decisions to ourselves: “well, but, this is a web app. It… it has… JSON. The people that can’t use the thing I built? They don’t get a say.”

We, as an industry, have nearly decided that we’re doing a great job as long as we don’t count the cases where we’re doing a terrible job.