@slhctech perhaps @digtialv has cleaned up pretty much everything except the main DIVI style CSS file which has the extra unused CSS. It would be great if the guys from DIVI will do some changes in the next version of the page builder. For instance, instead of compiling everything into one file, make it load 10 files.

However, it does require some work on their end and some of their users (who are not too techie), will say that the theme is loading many HTTP requests, you never know. However, these days, it doesn’t matter as much especially since many servers support HTTP/2 and there are plugins out there that can help you decrease the number of HTTP requests. Other themes are already doing this (multiple CSS files) and it won’t be a bad idea if popular themes like Divi will start making changes.

PS: There’s a feature in Asset CleanUp that allows you to use a filter and load a different version of the original CSS file (lighter one of course). You do need to input there the alternative CSS (mostly the needed one) so you need to be careful when using it. Once the documentation for this new feature is ready, I’ll post its link here.

@slhctech please do so as I believe it would be a good reminder (most likely other people told them the same thing or at least they are aware of this practice) for them!

I would love to use Asset CleanUp to load a different (smaller) CSS file but that assumes I can find someone to write it for me! How much do you reckon it would be likely to cost?

Unless you’re comfortable doing this yourself, yes, you need to find a good developer that will properly create the alternative CSS file which should be at least 80% smaller in size. It’s better to leave some extra unused CSS there just in case, then end up with a broken layout. It all depends on the situation. Sometimes, I’ve removed it 100%, but this is very rare and in those instances, I was very familiar with the whole website. I knew that I will not update the theme, nor any of the plugins too soon and I went ahead with stripping all the unused CSS.

In your case, you have the homepage that loads a lot of unused CSS. However, if you add new content to that page, then that particular content might need to use CSS that was before unused. So, when sometimes does this optimization, they need to think about how the page might look in the future too. In most cases, a page doesn’t change radically so one can go ahead with the change if there’s a lot of “fat” to strip.

As for the cost of creating a smaller version of that file (saving over 600 KB in page load), a professional WordPress developer would charge a few hundred dollars reason being the fact that he needs to analyze the homepage, determine how it might look in the future (as I mentioned previously), then start using a tool such as Coverage Google Chrome and determine which CSS is used and which isn’t on both desktop and mobile view. Also, the developer needs to do various actions on that page (clicking, hovering on various elements, etc.) so that any unused CSS might become needed (e.g. a new content loaded via AJAX is shown up that has certain CSS classes that need to be kept in the final version of the purified file). You have to think of it’s worth the cost of such a task. For heavily trafficked website, with certain landing pages that need to load very fast, it might be. Some website owners though do not consider it important and they don’t mind if the visitors are waiting for an extra 0.5s (depending on the internet connection, sometimes, it could be 0.2s which is alright) delay. I hope it helps!