While surfing the internet you must have come across a website that is very slow to load and when the website is loading for a very brief moment you see a flash of the unstyled webpage which forces you to ask many questions like

• Is this a legit website

• Does using this website download some viruses on my device

• Looks like it will take an eternity to load

• etc...

And if it is a website of some business then they might be in trouble, have a look at the following data

you can read the following report for more info

FOUC?

FOUC stands for Flash of Unstyled Content and it happens because the browser renders the page element before the style of the element is calculated. There are various reasons behind this like

1. Async Stylesheet - stylesheet is downloaded asynchronously

2. Large files - The Stylesheet is very large and it is taking the browser a longer time to create CSSOM

3. JS Style - Style is applied using JavaScript which is not yet parsed.

etc...

To avoid this situation browsers block the rendering of the website until CSS files are loaded and parsed but it leads to a situation where the user sees a blank page which is also not very desirable.

Solution

There is no perfect solution to this problem but a set of precautions that a developer can take to avoid such a situation

1. Preloading CSS

2. Using Inline CSS

3. Loading important CSS styles first

4. Avoiding styling elements using JavaScript

5. Optimizing the size of the stylesheets

6. Using modern frameworks that handle FOUC by default

Just by ensuring the following precautions a business can improve its conversion rate by making its website look more authentic, responsive and secure.

Thanks for reading