CSS Audit

This project contains an automated audit of the core WordPress CSS, including the number of distinct colors used, most specific selectors, how many properties use !important, and more. View the audit report here. This report is regenerated every day at 09:00 UTC, and runs over the latest CSS in WordPress/wordpress-develop.

To generate this report, there is a tool css-audit, which runs a set of audits.

Local Environment

To run the audits yourself, download or clone this repo, then install the dependencies. You will need node & npm installed.

$ git clone git@github.com:wordpress/css-audit.git
$ cd css-audit
$ npm install
$ npm run css-audit -- <files...>

If you want to work on the audits yourself, fork this repo to your account first. You can submit issues or PRs.

Running Audits

To run the audits, you need a list of CSS files, and to indicate which audits you want to run. yarn and npm both automatically expand globs (folder/*), so you can use that, or pass in a list of CSS files. The audits are described below, and can be run via the following CLI args, or via configuration file (described in the next section).

$ npm run css-audit -- <files ...> [options]

Usage: css-audit -- <files...> [options]

--colors          Run colors audit.
--important       Run !important audit.
--display-none    Run display: none audit.
--selectors       Run selectors audit.
--media-queries   Run media queries audit.
--property-values Run audit for a given set of property values, comma-separated.
--recommended     Run recommended audits (colors, important, selectors). Default: true.
--all             Run all audits (except property values, as it requires a value).
--format          Format to use for displaying report.
--filename        If using a format that outputs to a file, specify the file name.
--help            Show this message.

Configuration File

The program will prioritize configuration from CLI arguments, and will fallback to configuration stored in a file called css-audit.config.js.

module.exports = {
	format: 'json',
	audits: [
		'colors',
		'important',
		'display-none',
		'selectors',
		'media-queries',
		[ 'property-values', 'font-size' ],
		[ 'property-values', 'padding-top,padding-bottom' ],
	],
};

Generating HTML Reports

To generate an HTML report, use the --format=html option and specify a name for the file with the --filename=name option. This will output a {name}.html file in public/ that is viewable on Github Pages.

For example, generating a report for wp-admin using the below strategy for pulling down CSS files from SVN:

npm run css-audit -- v5.5/**/* --format=html --all --filename=wp-admin

In the configuration file, the argument filename can be added as a simple property: value combination, the same as format in the example. See the default css-audit.config.js.

Getting core CSS files

You can download the source files of CSS (not minified or RTL'd) from the svn repository. The following code will create a new directory, v5.5, and download just the files from each css folder.

mkdir v5.5
svn export https://develop.svn.wordpress.org/branches/5.5/src/wp-admin/css --depth files v5.5/admin
svn export https://develop.svn.wordpress.org/branches/5.5/src/wp-includes/css --depth files v5.5/includes

If you want to run this on trunk (code currently in development), you can swap out branches/5.5 for trunk. You could also swap the 5.5 for 5.4, etc. Example:

mkdir trunk
svn export https://develop.svn.wordpress.org/trunk/src/wp-admin/css --depth files trunk/admin
svn export https://develop.svn.wordpress.org/trunk/src/wp-includes/css --depth files trunk/includes

Now you can run the audits:

npm run css-audit -- v5.5/**/* --recommended

Available Audits

• colors
  • Number of unique colors — normalizes hex colors so that uppercase & lowercase are not counted twice
  • Number of unique colors (ignoring opacity)
  • List of all colors
  • Top 10 most-used colors
  • Top 10 least-used colors
• important
  • Number of times !important is used
  • Top properties that use !important
• property-values — needs a list of properties to inspect.
  • Usage: --property-values=[properties]. For example: --property-values=display, or --property-values=padding,margin
  • Number of unique values for [property]
  • Top 10 most-used values for [property]
  • Top 10 least-used values for [property]
• selectors
  • Total number of selectors
  • Number of selectors with IDs — not "number of IDs", a lot of selectors use multiple IDs, but they'd only be counted once
  • Top 10 selectors with the highest specificity
  • Top 10 selectors by length
• display-none
  • Number of times display: none is used
  • Places where display: none is used
• typography
  • A collection of information about various typography-related properties

Technical details

This tool parses each CSS file and creates an AST, which the audits traverse to pull out data. It uses postcss for most audits, but csstree for the media-queries audit. PostCSS gives us the plugins ecosystem so that we can use postcss-values-parser, while csstree generates a much more detailed AST that robustly identifies media queries.

• PostCSS API documentation
• csstree documentation
• AST Explorer — great tool for identifying how the CSS is parsed.