Tools to help clean up your CSS

You have created an awesome website. Over time, you add more pages, content and tweaks to the site. As your website gets larger, so can your CSS. You may add new styles for displaying a landing page, carousel or videos. Eventually, you have unused styles that no one remembers what it was used for. This unused CSS can start to slow your site down.

Tools to help clean up your CSS

Cleaning up your CSS from design changes and other additions can be a hard, time-consuming and tedious task. How do you clean up your website without breaking the site?

Steps to clean up your CSS

  1. Find and fix errors
  2. Identify unused CSS
  3. Validate with W3C Validator
  4. Test your website with the updated CSS

Find and fix errors

Errors can creep in your CSS. You may forget a semicolon, copy code from CodePen or Stack Overflow that solves a problem or another team member added custom CSS to solve a problem.

CSS Lint

CSS Lint analyzes your CSS and tells you what you are doing wrong. You can use it to help clean up your CSS and learn how to write it better.

CSS Lint

Identify unused CSS

As you develop your website, your CSS file can grow. It may contain CSS styles that are no longer used or styles that were abandoned. With a large website, it can be hard to tell which styles are still in use.

Use UnCSS to remove unused CSS

UnCSS is a Node.js powered tool that removes unused CSS from your stylesheets. It created a new CSS file with only the styles that are being used. Want on online options? UnCSS Online lets you test the tool for smaller CSS codebase.

UnCSS Online

Validate with W3C Validator

When you have fix your errors and removed unused CSS, use the W3C (World Wide Web Consortium) validator to check your website. It checks to ensure the technical quality of your website. You want to make sure that you didn’t introduce new errors into your cleaned up CSS.

W3C Validator

Test your website with the updated CSS

Since CSS is not easily testable, you want to make small changes and test each change. You want to make sure that the styles you removed or updated don’t break your design.

Cleaning up your CSS code is difficult, time-consuming and tedious. These tools can help to make the task easier.

What CSS tools have you used to make the process easier?

How I make Atom work for me

My new favorite text editor is Atom Code Editor. With Atom, you can modify the editor to fit your needs. I am going to show you a handful of tips and tricks that I use to make Atom work for me.

How I make Atom work for me

Customize Atom

You can customize fonts, font size and themes.

Change font and size

Don’t like the default font? Is the size too small? You can change that.

Atom > Preferences > Editor

  1. Enter a font name that you want to use.
  2. Enter a font size.
  3. Save.

Atom Editor Settings

If you want to go a step further, you can edit Atom’s stylesheet.

Themes

Atom comes with two default themes: Light and dark. If you don’t like them, you can install a new theme. Don’t know which one to install. Use Atom’s theme search to find your next favorite theme.

Atom > Settings > Themes

Atom Themes

Keyboard Shortcuts

Want to work faster in Atom? Use these keyboard shortcuts. Since, I use Atom on my Mac, the shortcuts are for a Mac.

Duplicate a line

When you are writing code, sometimes you have to write the same line over and over again. Instead of copying and pasting, you can have Atom do the copying and pasting for you.

  1. Go to a line you want to duplicate.
  2. Press the keys CRTL + SHIFT + D. It copies and paste your current line.
  3. Repeat for as many times as needed.

Move lines up or down

Have you ever need to rearrange some lines? Move one up from its current spot. Instead of cutting and pasting, you can use this shortcut to move a line up or down one.

  1. Go to a line you want to move.
  2. Press CMD + CTRL + UP (arrow). It moves your line up one row.

If you want to move it down, use CMD + CTRL + Down (arrow).

Comment out code

Different code can use different syntax for comments. You can use a shortcut to comment out your code. It will put the right syntax for comments depending on the language. You don’t need to remember to use the right comment syntax.

  1. Highlight the code that you want to comment out.
  2. Press CMD + /. Atom add comments to your code.

Conclusion

Atom is a great text editor. I like that I can customize it to look they way I want by changing the settings or install optional plugins. Atom’s shortcuts help you to use it even more productively.