css tutorial

Overview

Using CSS @import in an external stylesheet can add additional delays during the loading of a web page.

Details

CSS @import allows stylesheets to import other stylesheets. When CSS @import is used from an external stylesheet, the browser is unable to download the stylesheets in parallel, which adds additional round-trip times to the overall page load. For instance, if first.css contains the following content:

@import url("second.css")

The browser must download, parse, and execute first.css before it is able to discover that it needs to download second.css.

Recommendations

Use the <link> tag instead of CSS @import

Instead of @import, use a <link> tag for each stylesheet. This allows the browser to download stylesheets in parallel, which results in faster page load times:

<link rel="stylesheet" href="first.css">
<link rel="stylesheet" href="second.css">