Is it better to put all your CSS in 1 file or is it no problem to use 10 files or more like on most frameworks?

[conversal]

Is it better to put all your CSS in 1 file or is it no problem to use 10 files or more like on most frameworks?

[crackingmedia]

It really depends on how big your site is and how complex your CSS. On a small site or if it has minimal CSS one is perfectly adequate. On a larger site with lots of pages and CSS it makes sense to break down the the CSS around their function.Peter

[conversal]

Thanks for your answer!

It makes sense, because on large sites you will need different styling on different type of pages? So when you would put it all in 1 file, al this CSS would be loaded on ALL pages, while it's only needed on some particular?

Or what's the advantage here?

[brad.s.knutson]

For a production environment, I would suggest having one minified CSS file.  This will reduce file size (minifying) and server requests (1 file as opposed to 10).  This will help reduce page load time.

Of course, on your staging environment, or in an archive of the website, it would be best to have your stylesheets broken down into an easier to manage system.  That might mean multiple CSS files, it might not - it's up to you to manage.

[crackingmedia]

You could split them up based on where they are needed but that would become complicated. The advantage of splitting CSS on a large site is really to better organise the functionality of the CSS, e.g. system.css.

Peter

[conversal]

That's what I was thinking too.. Currently, most of my frameworks have 10 CSS files, which means you have 10 server requests. Page speed as in my eyes a very important factor, therefore this question...

[webmethod]

Hi,

From a code management point of view - as Peter says it's very common practice to split your CSS into different files as they are then much easier to manage and maintain. You can use a tool like Yahoo's YUI compressor to minify - as Bradley says - and aggregate (merge) these files.

From a web performance point of view, less files does not always mean better performance. Web browsers used to only download up to 2 files per domain, but now it's pretty standard for them to support 6 or more. See a browser breakdown for Max Connections and Connections per hostname here: http://www.browserscope.org/?category=network&v=top. I wouldn't recommend trying to split across 6 files, but you might find that if you have one massive CSS file it will download quicker when split up.

There is another disadvantage to having a single, CSS file in that you're not making the most of web browser caching. Every time you change any CSS, all users will have to download the entire file again. Again this may not be a problem for you, but something to bear in mind.

My advice would be to point Google Pagespeed at your website's key pages and act on as much as the feedback as possible: https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/. It is a fantastic resource and presents its findings very clearly.

George
@methodicalweb

[conversal]

Thanks a lot for this usefull info, it helped me understand this better.