Benefits of Getting Rid of Render Blocking Resources

on 16 Oct 2023, by Bogdan, in Blog, WordPress, Guides

by Bogdan

Research studies show that 53% of people are ready to leave your website if it takes more than 3 seconds to load. This is exactly what render-blocking resources do to a website.

By eliminating render-blocking resources from your website, you stand to reap multiple benefits that will bring your online business more success in the long run. For instance, this optimization technique can help you speed up your website, enhance your overall site user experience, boost your SEO, and much more. These components are essential for a solid online presence.

In this article, we’ll focus on the benefits of removing these render-blocking resources. We’ll cover the following:

What are render-blocking resources
How to eliminate render blocking resources (Different types of render blocking resources and how to remove them)
The benefits of removing render-blocking resources.

Let’s begin.

What are render blocking resources?

Before delving into the benefits, it's important that we know what render-blocking resources are and why they matter. Generally, render-blocking resources are files that prevent a web page from being displayed as quickly as possible.

These resources are commonly JavaScript and CSS files, although other elements like fonts and images can also cause rendering delays if not managed appropriately. (More on this in the next section).

When a web browser encounters a render-blocking resource, it pauses rendering other files until that blocking resource is downloaded and executed. This interruption in the rendering process results in a slower load time, which can frustrate users and lead to higher bounce rates.

To mitigate these issues, web developers and site owners employ various techniques to remove or optimize these render-blocking resources.

How to eliminate render-blocking resources

In this section, we'll discuss briefly how you can eliminate different types of render-blocking resources.

Getting rid of render-blocking resources is an essential step if you want to optimize your website for both speed and performance. This approach, however, depends on the type of blocking resources that the browser wants to load.

Important Note: The Lighthouse report shown in Googe PageSpeed Insights contains an Eliminate render blocking resources audit. This audit section can help you identify which render-blocking resources to remove from your web page. Alternatively, you can also use other tools such as Pingdom and GTmetrix.

The type of audience you want to target

Fonts carry diverse cultural and age-specific connotations. This simply means that the type of font design you pick for your website will evoke a specific feeling, emotion, or impression based on the culture or age group of the people seeing it.

For example, serif fonts are typically considered more formal and traditional. They can be suitable, for instance in a law firm website, while a casual sans-serif font could work well for a creative agency. If your target audience is young, go for a font that resonates with them.

Basically, a font can be friendly, progressive, stylish/chic, reliable, traditional, objective, expressive, respectable, etc. Certain fonts such as Bickham Script show elegance, while others like Lavandaria show creativity, fondness, and the list goes on and on.

Readability should be your top priority

Above all, your font text must be easy to read. Opt for fonts with clear and distinct characters. Sans-serif fonts like Arial, Helvetica, and Verdana are generally more readable on digital screens due to their clean lines and simplicity.

Render Blocking Script Tags

When it encounters render-blocking script tags, it will pause displaying the web page until these JavaScript files are fully downloaded and executed. During this time, a user will see a blank white page until the browser completes these steps.

The simplest way to avoid this delay is to use the async and defer attributes on all of your script tags. The async attribute will allow your script files to load asynchronously, without blocking HTML parsing. The defer attribute, on the contrary, tells the browser to load your scripts only after HTML parsing is complete.

Other methods you can apply include:

Place JavaScript files just before the closing <body> tag whenever possible.
Loading all JavaScript files at the bottom of the HTML will ensure that they won't block the rendering of the page's main content.
Minify and compress scripts – This technique typically reduces the size of your scripts, making them load faster.

Render Blocking CSS

While web-safe fonts provide basic compatibility, web font services like Google Fonts and Adobe Fonts offer a broader selection of fonts that are optimized for web use. These services often provide easy integration methods and allow you to enhance your typography choices beyond the standard web-safe fonts.

Tip: Since different devices and browsers may render fonts differently, it's important that you test your chosen fonts on various devices and browsers to ensure consistency. This step is crucial to guarantee that your website looks as intended to all users.

With all these in mind, you can easily add different types of web-safe fonts to your website using Brizy.

Removing render-blocking stylesheets is a lot harder than we may think. First of all, you have to decide which CSS files are critical and which are not. For this, you can use Chrome DevTools and PageSpeed Insights then, defer non-critical CSS files.

This process isn’t as straightforward as it sounds. It’s even more complicated for agencies with large web applications or websites. If you block the wrong CSS file, it can delay the visual presentation of your website. As a result, what you’ll see is a flash of unstyled content (FOUC), where your web page initially loads without external CSS files. Your users may see something like this:

On the contrary, eliminating render-blocking third-party CSS libraries and frameworks (or any other external stylesheets) is a viable process.

For example, let’s say you have a third-party widget that's only used further down the page. In such cases, you can update the styling to load later. You can also asynchronously load stylesheets that only load font references but do not affect the page layout. This list goes on and on.

Other alternative methods you can use:

Using media attribute to identify conditional CSS. Where conditional CSS is not required, it gets skipped and is not considered a render-blocking resource. However, if it is executed, it becomes render blocking.
In addition, you can use media queries to load responsive stylesheets only when they are required by the user.

Note: You can use the PostCSS plugin to defer all conditional CSS using the @media rule in your website.

Inlining Critical CSS

Inlining critical CSS allows you to place essential styles required for rendering above-the-fold content directly into the HTML document. The browser will be able to render above-the-fold content quickly without the need to fetch an external stylesheet.

How to Inline Critical CSS

Identify critical styles – Determine which CSS rules are necessary for rendering above-the-fold content. These include styles for headers, navigation, and introductory content.

For this, you can use tools such as HTML Critical Webpack Plugin or Criticalcss.com. Once you have located Critical CSS, inline those styles, so the browser doesn’t have to wait for resources to download and parse to load above-the-fold content. You can defer the non-critical CSS.

Remove unused CSS files. You can use automated tools like purifyCSS to analyze your CSS code to identify selectors that are not being used and remove them. This even includes CSS code from third-party libraries like Bootstrap or Tailwind.

Render-Blocking Fonts Resources

Google offers a convenient library of fonts for websites. But, even with Google's advanced font delivery methods, your site's speed can still suffer. To speed things up, you can use various tools such as DNS Preload, Prefetching Google Fonts, Local Font Loading, Adding Font CSS, and more to eliminate render-blocking Google Fonts. You can apply these techniques to speed up the loading of any fonts used on your web pages.

Important: You can read this article and find out more on how to eliminate render-blocking resources.

Now, let’s focus on the benefits of removing render blocking resources.

The benefits of removing render blocking resources

Eliminating render-blocking resources can help you manage your site resources efficiently and achieve your desired goals. The benefits of using this resource optimization technique include:

Improved page load speed and site performance

The first thing you’ll notice immediately when you remove all render-blocking resources is a slight boost to your overall page speed and site performance.

Resource optimization techniques such as minification, lazy loading render-blocking files, and other methods make the overall weight of your page lighter. This means that there will be fewer JS and CSS files to load. Since the browser has only a few resources to go through, it will display your content swiftly to your users.

In addition, page speed directly impacts user satisfaction and engagement. Studies have shown that even a one-second delay in page load time can lead to a substantial increase in bounce rates, up to 90%. Conversely, faster-loading pages are more likely to retain visitors and keep them engaged with your content or services.

Enhanced user experience

According to Kissmetric, 47% of site visitors expect your website to load within the first 2 seconds. It’s our job as site owners/digital agencies to meet this user expectation or your customers will readily leave. One way to achieve this is through the elimination of render blocks.

Simply, a faster website also implies that your site user experience is at its best. This is because getting rid of render blocking resources directly affects three core web vitals metrics Google uses to measure site user experience. These include:

Largest Contentful Paint (LCP) – which measures how fast content appears on your website.

When users can access your site quickly and effortlessly, they are more likely to engage with your content, explore your products, or complete desired actions such as making a purchase or filling out a contact form.

First input delay (FID) – which measures how long it takes for a user to interact with your website. When this is quick, it implies your users can click things like call to action (CTA) buttons, links, and popups, and take the desired action you wanted them to sooner.

Cumulative Layout Shift – measures how stable your website is. No user wants to engage with a website where elements such as images, buttons, etc., shift unexpectedly when they try to interact with them.

All these critical metrics working together not only enhance your site user experience. They can also increase user satisfaction and improve your conversion rates and user retention.

Increased brand credibility

When the user experience on your website is top-notch, this can help you build trust and business credibility with your customers. Users are more likely to perceive a well-optimized and fast-loading website as reliable and professional, fostering a positive impression that can influence their decision to return or recommend your site to others.

Lower bounce rates

Generally speaking, bounce rate refers to the percentage of visitors who leave a website after viewing only one page. According to research, your site’s bounce rates will skyrocket from 9% to 38% if it takes five seconds or more to load. Or, when the initial experience of your users is frustration due to delayed content display or FOUC.

By removing render-blocking resources and improving page loading speed, you can effectively reduce bounce rates. Visitors are more likely to stay on your site, explore multiple pages, and engage with your content when they experience fast and smooth navigation.

Improved search engine rankings

Removing render-blocking resources encompasses several resource optimization techniques that clean up your code, optimize it, and make it short and precise. This implies that search engines will have an easy time crawling through your website.

Furthermore, search engines like Google prioritize user experience as a ranking factor. Since your website is loading faster, provides a better user experience, and has a lower bounce rate, it is more likely to rank higher in search engine results pages (SERPs).

Note: The Core Web Vitals we mentioned earlier also form part of Google’s ranking algorithm. So, addressing render-blocking resources generally aligns with Google's emphasis on delivering fast and responsive web experiences, making it an essential aspect of its SEO strategy.

Improved mobile friendliness

Getting rid of render-blocking resources enables you to prioritize which resources to display on mobile and which not to. Those that you consider non-critical resources can be deferred and only displayed when it’s required on certain screen sizes. By doing this, eliminating render blocks partly improves the site user experience on mobile devices.

By now, you should know that eliminating render-blocking resources takes hard work. It requires extensive site understanding, management, and technological grip to do it successfully.

However, you can avoid all of this with the help of a Site Builder WordPress plugin called Brizy.

Brizy handles everything on your behalf. You won’t have to write any single line of code.

Conclusion

The process of eliminating render-blocking resources has substantial benefits for both desktop and mobile users. It results in fast-loading, more responsive, efficient, and accessible websites that align with site user expectations today. This, in turn, contributes to higher search engine rankings and a positive brand image.

If you want to make your website faster and better with little to no fuss at all, try Brizy. It is user-friendly, easy to use, and helps you create lightning-fast websites that provide a seamless experience for your users.

Boost your site's speed and enhance user satisfaction with Brizy today!

Article by Bogdan

Co-founder & Head of Design, Bogdan has a passion for everything that works great and looks awesome. Guilty for most of the UI and UX around this place, you can say "Hi" to him at bogdan at brizy dot io