But, out of the box, a framework like Tailwind CSS or Bootstrap is not intended to be minimal or lightweight by default. It is typically possible to reduce the size of the bigger frameworks to something much more modest. This bundle size example is relevant in the context of fetching the framework directly through a CDN.

I don’t need to get caught up with rules and design options that I will never use in practice.Īnd as I said earlier, bundle size for modern frameworks can be absurdly high. It’s a bit crazy, to say the least.įor me, a lightweight CSS framework gives me the tools to create my main containers, assign a few elements to them, and then I can focus on custom styling if I need it. The average size for a webpage today is around 2.5Mb once all the JavaScript has finished rendering. I think one of the trends happening in modern web dev right now is that developers simply don’t care about the page size of their final designs. For a simple project – portfolio, blog, resume pages – a framework that has a bundle size of 50kb+ seems a bit overkill. They are all incredible frameworks for building complex and in-depth layout structures.īut, generally speaking, such frameworks are intended for projects where the design transpires across multiple pages. When someone mentions the phrase CSS frameworks, for a lot of people, the first thing that comes to mind is Bootstrap, Tailwind CSS, or Semantic UI. The main advantages of lightweight frameworks.

Simple css library