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CSS best practices: Customizer, styles.css, or CSS plugin?

I'm interested in my Wordpress pages loading as quickly as possible. I see in my code that there is a LOT of CSS written into the <head> of my child theme. This leads me to ask how best to add custom CSS.
-- in the styles.css?
-- in the Customizer?
-- in a plugin like Simple CSS?
-- enqueue it some other way?
I mostly use the Customizer since access to it is so easy. But I'm not sure this is the best approach.
Probably pluses and minuses to each method -- would appreciate your guidance. Thanks!

  • Ari

    Hey Larry Levenson,

    Thanks for asking the question here.

    The Answer is: style.css

    style.css is the first priority, and it is the best option to have your custom CSS, though customizer is also ok.

    Why? Because of style.css is already hooked into the WordPress by enqueue it.
    So try to avoid plugins to write CSS, since it will add another hook into the WordPress.

    Because of you need performance & fast loading you can try our performance increasing plugin
    https://premium.wpmudev.org/project/wp-hummingbird/

    And also for image optimization: https://premium.wpmudev.org/project/wp-smush-pro/

    ====

    These two plugin will do below stuff to increase the site performance:
    1: Image Optimization, so the images loads quickly as possible
    2: Compression
    3: File like HTML, CSS, JS minification
    4: Browser caching
    ...and many more

    If you have any question, let me know here, I'm here to help you!

    Regards, Ari