Remove unused CSS from Elementor website manually

People do not realize the amount of CSS is being loaded on their pages or posts. If you test your site in Google page speed Insights (PSI) or any lab testing tools you will see a large amount of CSS loaded by your themes, 3rd parties plugins or page builder, or theme builder if you’re using.

Removing unused CSS in WordPress is a tedious process and it can end up breaking your site if it isn’t done right.

Performance test

Accordingly to Google PSI reports, this page can potentially save over 60 KB which is huge, Your’s site may differ.

Before

After removing with Asset Clean up plugin

After applying an advanced method

This question always comes in Facebook groups.

How to remove unused CSS from the Elementor website (manually)?

Before I discovered this method, I was using Remove unused CSS from the web.dev article to identify unused CSS it was good for smaller stylesheets. But if your website is built with Elementor or any page builders things can be complicated and the size of stylesheets is getting bigger and more complicated.

Am I right? I think the answer is true

That is why I wrote this tutorial to help you solve these problems that are recommended by Google Page Speed Insights (PSI).

Before you start implementing it on your site, you might be asking yourselves, what are the benefits of removing it?

I want the same answer too so that is why I asked the question a while ago on the WP Speed Matters Facebook Group and this is what I got.

Benefits of Removing Unused CSS

The second point might be incorrect because removing unused CSS wouldn’t fix Rendering Blocking resources, it will surely reduce page weight & HTTP requests.

Answers are still there and If you want to learn and improve your site performance, I highly recommended Joining WP Speed Matters Facebook Community. You will be going to love it, just by browsing & you will learn tons of advanced stuff from the archive.

This step-by-step article is complicated and long to read

People are lazy and do not want to follow all the processes listed below and want to remove unused CSS automatically, here are some of the 3rd parties plugins you can test on your website.  

If you have another plugin you want me to include. Please don’t hesitate to do it.

Six plugins will automatically remove your unused CSS from the Website

– WP Rocket: Remove Unused CSS (Beta)

– Swift Performance

Right now Swift Performance (free and Pro) has the option to remove unused CSS automatically from the website because the last time I activate the feature all my hover effects, and pseudo-elements are all broken. ( You need to test it thoroughly).

To access this feature. Follow these steps-

1. Enable Advance view otherwise, it wouldn’t show up by default.
2. Go to Optimization – Styles – Enable Disable Full CSS

– FlyingPress

– RapidLoad Power-Up plugin for Autoptimize

– NitroPack

– Perfmatters: Remove Unused CSS

In Version 1.9.2, Perfmatters Remove Unused CSS BETA tag, and thanks to Massimo Villa for the update.

Process of Removing Unused CSS (manually) from the website:

Step#1 Get a baseline Performance score

In order to optimize our website, first, we need to get a performance score on this page, later on, we can compare both the picture.

In this process, we are going to optimize the singer template, that I got from Envato Elements Plugins.

Accordingly, to Google PageSpeed Insights, I can save over 60 KB of CSS, but your CSS size may differ from mine.

Step#2 Open Chrome Developer tools & start capturing coverage Tab

Tips:

For example, if you combined or merge CSS in your performance plugins then it is not easy to identify which CSS is in used or not, there are 2 ways to solve this issue –

1. Remove page or post from caching this is one of the most common and the safest way. After you optimized the post or page re-added again. or if you’re using HTTP/2 Protocol, do not combine your stylesheets in the first place.
2. By adding ?nocache or any string to the end of your URL to bypass cache. (This might serve uncached version and old data or it might not serve either) (Not all the plugin supports this)

Step#2(A) – Right-click to open Inspect Elements

Watch the video properly, it covers tills #3 Identify Unused CSS problems from the Coverage tab.

One of the easiest ways to open Developer tools is by right-clicking on any place with your mouse and clicking Inspect to open Inspect Elements panel. 

Step# 2(B) – Click the Customize and Open DevsTools Menu (3 dots) in Chrome Dev Tools

We need to use the Run Command and select coverage reports.

Step# 2(C) – Click the Coverage tab

There will be lots of items in the list when you use the “Run Command” but we have to select Coverage or simply type “Show Coverage or Coverage” to open the Coverage report.

Then, click the reload button and start capturing coverage.

I have tested this page without enabling Improved CSS Loading Elementor’s experiments features in the settings tab. That is why the CSS size is huge.

Disabled:

Enabled: After I enabled the experiments. Page Size does reduce a lot but still, there are lots of unused CSS that can be removed (Red color).

Settings to enable “Improved CSS Loading” in Elementor. Keep in mind that Improved Asset & CSS loading is in an Alpha or beta stage which means there will be bugs and potentially it can mess up your design. You can see one of the examples of why the Elementor Menu is broken.

Do it at your own risk.

Step#3- Identify Unused CSS problems from the Coverage tab

Click the reload button to start capturing coverage. Next to the URL Filter on the right side, there is an option to choose, from there choose filter coverage by type to CSS.

So it will show only CSS files.

The red color of the bar indicates unused bytes and the greenish color indicates used bytes

You will get all the information like shortcuts, tips everything from Chrome Dev tools Coverage.

Step#4- Test before you start removing it

We figure out which stylesheets are not in use from the usage visualization panel above but we can’t be 100% sure whether the file we’re removing is not going to break our style.

To safely remove with confidence, we have to head over to the Chrome Dev tools – network panel and then right-click on the stylesheet you want to remove (100% one), then click the Block request URL this will open the request blocking tab (shown on the picture below) which lets you block requests you don’t want to load and then refresh the page and see if it doesn’t break. You do this process over and over.

TIPS: Request Blocking can be done with Webpagetest too and it is currently in Beta Stage.

Install the Asset clean plugin and start unloading style you don’t need

We have already figured out which stylesheets can be removed 100% safely with request blocking and coverage reports in Chrome Dev tools. Now we need to install this plugin so we can remove unused CSS and JavaScript code from the entire website or per page/post basis.

You can do the same thing with other asset management plugins too.

Before we remove

Removing unused CSS

Now go to the page/post, you’re removing and toggle the “Unload on this page button” to unload CSS from loading. 

Removing unused JS

This method can be applied to removing unused JS too but it can be tricky because of JS dependencies just make sure you enabled the ‘Ignore dependency rule and keep the “children” loaded’ input box (See the screenshot below). Otherwise, all the child files will not load.

Results after unloading CSS with Asset clean up plugin ( picture show – Before and after removal)

After unloading with Asset clean up

We have saved more than 20 KB of transfer size just by unloading stylesheets with the help of the asset clean-up plugin. If you’re using lots of 3rd parties plugins or addons that add styling to your page, then you may be able to reduce page weight even better than mine.

How to reduce unused CSS completely (Advanced Method)

In the next step, we are going to learn how to remove unused CSS manually in WordPress with the help of the Chrome extension.

The drawback of manually removing unused CSS:

1. It is a time-consuming process.
2. Removing unused CSS is not worth it if you constantly updating your pages.
3. If JavaScript dynamically injects styles or CSS classes are present, then this chrome extension will fail to extract the used CSS. (I will explain how to include them later)
4. Great for the smaller website like single-page websites, Landing pages but not for larger websites such as News websites.
5. If there is the style being updated, you will have to redo everything again from the start unless you use the same CSS class or an id.

Step#1- Install CSS Used Chrome Extension from Chrome Web Store

After we saved more than 20 KB of file sizes just by unloading stylesheets with the Asset clean up plugin, we still have lots of unused CSS problems that can be removed but it was not possible.

But with the help of the used CSS Chrome extension, we will be able to remove unused CSS completely, even if the CSS was injected by JavaScript.

While I was researching how to remove unused CSS from Elementor myself, I stumbled upon StackOverflow channels (If I found the URL I will list it here). The Chrome Extension works 100% on static pages but lacks CSS classes that are dynamically injected by JavaScript like the Laura Brehm pop-up trigger by interacting with the hamburger menu.

Step:2- Extract Used CSS using Used CSS Chrome Extension

After we have installed the Chrome extension. If you’re in Dev tools, make sure you refresh the page. Now open Elements Panel [Follow Step#2(A)] and this will open the DOM tree from there click the HTML tag and click the CSS Used tab on the right side of the panel. (see the attachment below for reference)

After you click the CSS used tab, it will go through all the processes and extract the used CSS from the page but the problem with this method is that it misses the Dynamic CSS that is injected by the JavaScript. To fix these problems, we have to interact with the layout in this example it is by interacting with the Hamburger menu and opening the menu (See it in the next step).

1. Open Elements Panel
2. Click the HTML tag.
3. Click the CSS used Tab next to the Accessibility tag
4. Click the Preview button to open in the New tab or click the copy button to copy CSS and upload it to your server.

Step#3- Include Dynamic style, CSS Classes, and IDs to the extracted CSS

To Detect dynamically injected CSS classes or id by Used CSS chrome extension, we need to first interact with the layout itself, in my case, it will be by interacting with the hamburger menu.

(if you have 1000 posts this method will take you more than a week or more to do which is not a great experience for you use the Automatic process list above)

To capture all the CSS, make sure you interact with the page and open it like the opening menu (See the screenshot below).

First what I did is interact with the Hamburger menu this way Elementor Dialog JS will inject the CSS and click the HTML tag and then click the CSS Used tab to generate unused CSS this will include the CSS injected by JS.

Step#4- Copy the minified code to your Code editor and save it

By Default used CSS chrome extension will generate minified code but if you want to remove like inline style, global style, etc. You can un-minify the code with online tools or prettier VS code and paste the minified CSS to your editor and save it in .css file format. So you can upload the file or copy the code to our server with the help of FTP or by accessing the control panel.

Tips: If you have Visual Studio (VS) code, you can use a prettier extension to minify by entering F1 on your keyboards or using Online tools to minify it, or use Beautify VS Code extension to un-minify the code.

Log in to your control panel and upload the file

I use Runcloud as my control panel so the process may be different but you can still follow these steps because we are going to upload it to the wp-content folder.

In this step, we are going to upload a file or create a .css file in the wp_content folder in the file manager or upload it using the FTP client.

Step#1- Log in to your control panel (cPanel)

Step#2- Select your Server

Step#3- Head over to Web Application and choose your root folder

Now head over to the Web Application area and choose your root. i.e., Domain

Step#4- Open File Manger

Step#5- Scroll down and find and open the wp-content folder

After you open File manager, you need to scroll down to the end and find the wp-content folder. This folder contains everything like your media, Plugins, Themes, cache, etc

Step#6- Create a new folder or use the existing folder

After we open the wp-content folder there will be an existing folder, if you’re using any Performance plugins like swift or wp-rocket then there is a chance it will create a folder automatically for you called cache. 

Click the Cache folder and inside the cache folder, create your folder (combine-assets), this is the folder you will add all your stylesheets or JavaScript.

It is up to you to choose the folder path, you can also choose the WP Content ‘assets folder‘ rather than ‘cache folder‘.

Step#7- Create .css file inside combine-assets ( change if needed) folder

Unfortunately, Runcloud does not allow us to upload assets directly through their Control Panel but it is possible through FTP clients like FileZilla. Since the size of the CSS is small. So for me, it is to create a file and copy & paste the minified code.

After you have created a folder ( example – combine-assets), you need to create a file-name.css file that will store our extracted CSS from number #9

Give a file name (example – Laura-Brehm) and save it in .css format.

Step#8- Open the file and paste the extracted CSS from your code editor

Open the file and copy all the CSS ( Ctrl + A and Ctrl + C) from your code editor and paste it inside the File editor (laura-brehm.css file) and save it.

Or you can install the File manager plugin from WP Repository or use FileZilla to upload your file.

Install Code Snippets plugins and enqueue the stylesheet

We have uploaded the stylesheets to our wp-content folder, now we need to load or by using wp_enqueue to load the stylesheet.

Step#1 – Install the Code Snippets plugin-

Now install Code Snippet Plugin from WP Repository and activate the plugin.

Step#2 – Click the Add new Snippet and add enqueue the stylesheet-

Now use the wp_enqueue_style to enqueue(load) your stylesheet and it will automatically add the stylesheet to the head tag of your page.

// With the help of PHP, I use Code Snippet plugin opening php tag and closing is not there
// Change the post number with respected post number
// You arenot required to add opening and closing PHP tag, if you're using Code snippet plugin

function laura_brehm() {
// 1978 is the post type referring to laura-brehm template page like your-domain.com/wp-admin/post.php?post=1978
    if( is_page ( 1978 )) {	
//Enqueue Stylesheets properly
	wp_enqueue_style('laura-brehm','/wp-content/cache/combine-assets/laurabrehm.min.css', array(), '1.1', 'all');

	
    } 
}

add_action('wp_enqueue_scripts', 'laura_brehm');

Unload all the stylesheets using the Asset clean up plugin

After you enqueue the stylesheet with the Code Snippet plugin. We have to click the “Unload on this page” toggle on all the stylesheets to remove/dequeue/unload it.

If you want to exclude some stylesheets like global stuff make sure you click the Ignore dependency rule and keep the “children” this also applied to stylesheets too.

Results

Recommended Links for further improvements-

1. WP Speed Matters
2. web.dev – Fast Load Times