2023-06-09
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Hamsa Harcourt
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Jun 9, 2023 ⋅ 8 min read

Guide to removing unused CSS code with PurgeCSS

Hamsa Harcourt I'm Hamsa, a software engineer with a strong passion for building human-centric products. I love teaching concepts about JavaScript and the web at large.

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7 Replies to "Guide to removing unused CSS code with PurgeCSS"

    1. Keep in mind that PurgeCSS doesn’t touch your source CSS files, just the ones that are output by the build process. So if you add new code that needs CSS rules that were previously purged, then the next time you build your app PurgeCSS will see that your code is using some new rules and will not purge them in that build.

  1. In frameworks such as Angular, you can use scss which is complied down to css. Is there any way to achieve this on scss?

    1. It doesn’t make sense to run it on SCSS because other SCSS files might be referencing your code dynamically elsewhere. You can transpile it to CSS, then run the process on CSS as part of your CI pipeline or have a local git hook to do so. It has the same effect.

  2. So how do you use this on a standard static HTML website? What if someone does not use any javascript or php frameworks?

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