Design Changes Now Appear the Moment You Save Them
Two related improvements. Stylesheets are considerably smaller, and a change you make in your design settings shows up immediately rather than whenever your browser decides to look again.
The cache problem, which was the worse of the two
Stylesheets are cached aggressively, and correctly, because they rarely change. The address of the file stayed the same when its contents changed, so a browser holding yesterday's copy had no reason to fetch today's.
The effect on the person using it was maddening. You change your accent color, save, look at your site, and nothing happens. You change it again. Still nothing. Eventually you clear your cache, or you give up and conclude the feature is broken.
The fix is standard and we should have done it sooner: the address now includes a marker that changes whenever the file does. A changed stylesheet is a new address, so it is always fetched, and an unchanged one is still cached for a year.
The size reduction
Every design shipped one stylesheet containing rules for every feature it might use. A site with no shop still carried the shop styles. A site with no gallery carried the gallery styles.
Now each design's stylesheet is assembled from what your site actually uses. Typical reduction is between 60 and 80 percent, and it is largest on the simplest sites, which are usually the ones on the slowest connections.
Also removed
- Rules for features retired years ago.
- Three copies of the same reset, from three different eras.
- Vendor prefixes for browsers that no longer exist.
- Two font weights loaded by every design and used by none.
Why this is an SEO improvement
Stylesheets block rendering: a browser will not paint the page until it has them. Cutting the stylesheet is one of the few changes that directly improves the moment at which a visitor sees something, which is the measurement search engines actually care about.
The rest of that work is in faster page loads across all designs and web fonts from a CDN.
Nothing to do
This applied to every site automatically. If you had previously concluded that a design setting did not work, it is worth trying it again. It probably did work and you were looking at a cached copy.
Create a free actor website and change a color. It will change.
