A cascading stylesheet or CSS is a programming script which you can use to create and modify the presentation of HTML-based websites, such as those built with WordPress. With CSS, you can control the layout, fonts, colours and other visual attributes of your site. Thankfully, most website-building programs today mean that users don’t need to use CSS at all. However, if you are a web developer or want to make specific changes to your theme, CSS can still be quite useful. Here we discuss why you don’t need to use CSS but explain what you can do with it if you choose to.
Why learning CSS is not essential
CSS is used to control the visual appearance of HTML websites and is written in a specialised programming language. In the early days of the internet, you needed to know CSS to create websites, however, over the years website building software has made it increasingly easy to build sites without needing any knowledge of either CSS or HTML. While these languages are still used in the background, the programming is created automatically – all you need to do is drag and drop content blocks into place, choose which type of content you want to go in them (headings, text, images, etc.) and then add the content.
Most modern websites are built with user-friendly, online programs like our Site Builder. With Site Builder, for example, you can choose from over 150 customisable website themes and 350 different content blocks. You can then use its drag-and-drop editor to arrange the content blocks on your pages as you wish, enabling you to create totally unique, mobile-friendly websites – and you get the use of over 200,000 premium images to bring your site to life. With this kind of simplicity at your fingertips, there is no need to use CSS at all.
Who can benefit from CSS?
CSS might be helpful if you are a web developer, web designer or someone who has a specific need to tweak their website theme in a way that is not possible with WordPress, Site Builder or other programs. However, the way modern website-building software works today, even then your need for it might be limited. Here are some of the things you can do with CSS.
- Tweak how pages look
Using a CSS stylesheet, you are able to make changes to how your website looks. A CSS file enables you to modify layout, font, colours and style information across your entire website, ensuring that your chosen style is adopted across every page.
That said, these things can also be done without manually creating CSS, using the customisation options within your chosen theme. You may only ever need CSS if the theme doesn’t allow the options you want.
- You can make your site faster
A fast-loading website is important because some visitors will leave if it loads too slowly. Faster sites can rank better in search engine results too. What CSS allows you to do is make your website coding lightweight. This means your server sends less data to the users’ browsers, enabling the site to load faster.
While this is true, most modern website-building programs, like Site Builder, create lightweight CSS stylesheets of their own, so this happens automatically. You would only need to use CSS if the stylesheet you already had was causing issues.
- Improve search engine ranking
Search engines consider the information at the top of web pages to be the most important in determining what the content of the page is about. As CSS can control a page’s layout, it can be used to ensure that important information sought by search engines is near the top of the page. However, you don’t necessarily need CSS to do this anymore. Most themes are built so that things like titles and menus are at the top of a page anyway and you can organise your content however you want with a drag-and-drop builder.
Conclusion
Cascading stylesheets (CSS) are important parts of websites as they determine the layout, fonts, colours and other aspects of your pages. However, most people do not need to learn CSS coding or create a style sheet of their own as they come pre-coded with your theme or can be created automatically as you build your site with the latest software. If you do use CSS today, it will be because you want to tweak an existing style sheet or because you are a developer or designer building a website from scratch. If you are looking for an easy way to build professional websites without having to create a CCS stylesheet or use HTML, take a free trial of our Site Builder.
