Cleaning up the CSS on my Jekyll-powered site

Posted on January 13, 2021

Since I couldn’ve sleep and was feeling inspired both by Kev Quirk’s Simple.css Jekyll guide and Thumb’s Classless Jekyll site, I decided to clean up with the SCSS files that can be overridden/modified for Jekyll’s default theme Minima. In particular, I removed every class I could find in the _sass/minima/_base.scss and _sass/minima/_layout.scss files. This required also explicitly removing class declarations throughout my HTML files in _layouts/, which unfortunately there are still class declarations throughout parts of the minima theme base I haven’t overridden and removed yet.

Regardless, I decided to run a GTMetrix test before pushing the new site, which showed my site at 19.9 KB uncompressed. At the time of this writing, I was able to bring it down to 15.4 KB uncompressed; that’s a ~29.2% decrease!

Overall, I don’ve think the aesthetics of the site has changed much at all, as I was able to keep my Nord template and refining my SCSS files. My goal next is likely to get rid of my dependency from the Minima theme during the static site generation, but I’ll save that for another time.

I should really go to sleep now…