Remove unused CSS from Elementor website manually

People do not realize the amount of unused CSS being loaded/injected on their pages or posts by their themes and plugins. If you test your site in Google Page Speed Insights (PSI) or any lab testing tools you will see a large amount of CSS is loaded.

Removing unused CSS in WordPress is a tedious process and it can end up breaking your layout and messing up your design 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. The bigger your site is the better you can save.

Before the optimization

After removing with Asset CleanUp plugin

Final Result after cleaning up with Asset CleanUp plugin and the Chrome Extension

This question always comes in Facebook groups.

How to remove unused CSS from the Elementor website?

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.

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 do it automatically, So 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

WP Rocket removes the BETA-mentioned enhancement in version 3.12. Get more details in the changelog.

– 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 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 the Unused CSS BETA tag, and a Huge thank you to Massimo Villa for the update and for providing me the image.

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

Step#1 Get a baseline Performance score

To optimize our website, first, we need to get a performance score on this page, later, 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 use 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 the page was 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 anywhere 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 the Dev tools Inspect Elements panel. 

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

Step# 2(C) – Coverage Report

You can access the “Coverage Report” by clicking or hovering over the “More Tools” option.

1. Click the 3 dots (Customize and Dev tools)
2. More tools
3. Coverage report to start capturing network activities

Then, click the reload button and start capturing coverage.

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

Disabled:

UPDATE: Improved Asset & CSS loading features are stable and you can enable them on every website. If it breaks follow my article on why Elementor Menu is broken.

After I Enabled the features the page Size relatively reduce a lot compare to the disabled but there are still lots of unused CSS that can be removed (see the Red color).

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, 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

Testing is crucial, 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: The request Blocking feature is also available in the Webpagetest and it is currently in Beta Stage.

Install the Asset CleanUp plugin and start unloading stylesheets

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.

Now go to the page/post you’re removing and toggle the “Unload on this page button” to unload CSS from loading or “unload site-wide” (be careful though this will remove the stylesheet everywhere).

Removing unused JS

This CSS method can be applied in removing unused JS too but it is tricky and it can break your site functionalities because of dependencies.

For some reason, If you’re removing JS I would suggest you enabled the ‘Ignore dependency rule and keep the “children” loaded’ input box (See the screenshot below) whenever needed. Otherwise, all the child files (frontend-modules and elementor-waypoints) will not load. or If you do not want to load any JS at all, unload jQuery. (Do it at your own risk)

After Unloading stylesheets & JavaScript (Before and After the result)

Before

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

After

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 add-ons that add styling to your page, then you may be able to reduce more.

The drawback of removing unused CSS manually:

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 smaller websites 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.

(Advanced Method) How to reduce unused CSS completely

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

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

After we saved more than 20 KB of file sizes just by unloading stylesheets with the help of the Asset CleanUp plugin, we still have lots of unused CSS remains that can be removed completely.

With the help of the Used CSS Chrome extension, we will remove all the unused CSS, even if there is dynamic CSS 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 Hamburger’s menu pop-up triggering by interacting with it.

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, this will grab everything, 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 IDs 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.

Caution: (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 who use the Automatic process listed above)

To capture all the CSS, make sure you interact with the page and open it like the opening menu (See the screenshot below) and this is what I did:

1. I interact with the Hamburger menu this way Elementor Dialog JS will inject the CSS.
2. Click the HTML tag and then click the CSS Used tab to generate used CSS this will include the CSS injected by JS.

1. Click the Hamburger Menu (icon)
2. On the right side, click the Elements panels
3. Click the <html tag in the DOM tree.
4. Click the CSS Used, it will scan and generate all the used CSS
5. Now, you can copy the code and further optimize it or see the design by clicking the preview button or viewing your website on CodePen.

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

By default, the Used CSS Chrome extension will generate the minified code, this will include inline style generated by your theme, plugins, or hardcoded CSS/ manually added CSS. These CSS can safely ignore it unless you have the pro version of the Asset CleanUp plugin.

You can remove the inline style generated by your theme or plugins because we can’t remove it. Next, un-minify the code with the online free tools or use the prettier VS code and then save the minified file as a .css file format. So you can upload the file or copy the code to your server with the help of FTP or by accessing the control panel (cPanel).

Tips: If you’re using 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 using Beautify VS Code extension to un-minify the code.

Log in to your cPanel and upload the file

I use Runcloud as my control panel so my process of accessing the control panel will be different. But our goal is the same, upload the stylesheet 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 Manager

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. I am just using it for demonstration purposes only (change it to another location and create a folder instead). 

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 the ‘cache folder‘.

Step#7- Create a .css file inside the 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 (for example – file.min.css) and save it.

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.

After you uploaded your file or copy and paste the code as I did. We need to install the Code Snippets plugin available in the WordPress repository or use a child theme.

Install Code Snippets plugins and enqueue the stylesheet

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

Step#1 – Install the Code Snippets plugin-

Now install Code Snippet Plugin from WP Repository and activate the plugin or use the Child Theme function.php file.

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

Now use the wp_enqueue_style function to enqueue (load) your stylesheet.

           
    // I use Code Snippet plugin so opening php tag and closing is not needed
    // Change the post ID with respected post ID
    // later if you're updating the code, simply update the version from 1.1 to 1.2

    function laura_brehm() {
        // 1978 is the post type referring to the 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 CleanUp plugin

After you enqueue the stylesheet with the Code Snippet plugin. Make sure you check it using the Asset CleanUp options and then 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 applies to stylesheets.

Results

Before

After

Recommended Links for further improvements-

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