Table of Contents
What is Code Bloat?
What is Excessive Code?
Symptoms of Code Bloat
Consequences of Code Bloat
SEO Consequences of Code Bloat
Causes of Code Bloat in Web Development
How to Find and Mitigate Code Bloat in Your Website
I think it is fair to say that no one likes waiting around for a web page to load. In fact, it has been reported that more than half of mobile website visitors leave a website if it takes more than a few seconds to load.
That is where code bloat can sneak in and contribute to slowing down website performance.
What is Code Bloat?
Code bloat is the presence of excess, unnecessary and/or unused code (HTML, CSS and JavaScript) within a website page, leading to a slowdown of web page load speed. Thus, code bloat literally means that your website is loaded with code that is not required for your website to run as intended.
What is Excessive Code?
Excessive code often comes from unused libraries you added ages ago but never touch since then. For example, if your website pulls in a full JavaScript toolkit (jQuery, Bootstrap, etc.) just for one slider, this may leave megabytes of dead weight in terms of unused code.
Redundant CSS rules can pile up too, adding unnecessary size and complexity. Utilizing third-party scripts for analytics can balloon file sizes from kilobytes to megabytes. Implementing overly nested HTML structures add another layer of bloat, forcing web browsers to parse more than is really needed.
Symptoms of Code Bloat
Symptoms of code bloat can be readily identified using tools such as Google’s PageSpeed Insights, which can help to point out performance shortfalls via important metrics such as Time to First Byte and Largest Contentful Paint.
Causes of Code Bloat in Web Development
Over-reliance on Frameworks
The allure of many web frameworks is usually the promise that they can facilitate quicker builds. But the tradeoff is that they introduce increased overhead in the form of greater complexity and code bloat. For example, a WordPress theme (such as one that is offered as “multi-purpose”) might include image sliders, online forms and galleries you never use, stuffing your website with excessive code.
Over-reliance on Plugins
Plugins are yet another alluring concept. They offer greater extensibility for your theme, but each one can add code and database queries that increase page load times.
Consequences of Code Bloat
Reports have indicated that for roughly each additional second in page load time, can increase bounce rates by more than 30%. Some studies cited by Google indicate that slow loading websites can result in up to a roughly 7% loss in conversions per second delayed. This is a particularly important consideration with respect to mobile device users.
SEO Consequences of Code Bloat
Code bloat does not just slow down a website it can negatively impact user experience and user engagement. As such, bounce rates can increase and organic search rankings can drop. That may also be in part due to the fact that Google prefer fast websites, such that slow ones may end up getting ranked less favorably in the SERPs.
Increased Bandwidth Consumption and Mobile User
Excessive code guzzles data, which can particularly costly to mobile users who are on limited data plans.
How to Find and Mitigate Code Bloat in Your Website
To help identify code bloat in your website, run your URL through Google PageSpeed Insights. This valuable tool can provide you with valuable insight as it flags issues like unused JavaScript or render-blocking resources. You can also use Lighthouse, which is built into Chrome DevTools.
Code Removal
Once you have identified code bloat, you can remove inefficient or unnecessary code such as CSS and JavaScript.
Code Minification
There are online tools that can help you to minify your website’s CSS and JS. What is minification? Minification is a process by which whitespace, unnecessary characters and code comments can be stripped out.
Image Compression and Deferral
You can enable tools such as Brotli or Gzip on your web server to shrink text-based files even further. It can also help to compress images which results in smaller files sizes, leading to faster page loads, lower bandwidth use and better web page performance. It is also generally a good practice to add defer or async to scripts so they can be loaded and executed without blocking the browser’s HTML rendering process.
Critical CSS and Resource Loading Prioritization
You can also inline critical CSS for above-the-fold content, that way it renders instantly without extra requests. You may also want to lazy-load images and videos below the fold with native browser support.
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