How to use CSS with WordPress?

It’s very easy nowadays to build your own website with the help of CMS such as WordPress. The only thing you need to do is install a WordPress theme and make the customizations you wish.

In order to create your favourite WordPress themes a lot of developers write a ton of CSS, HTML, PHP, and JavaScript code.

But what do they mean?

CSS stands for cascading style sheets and is the language which web designers use in order to style a page. It has control over font styles, colours, column sizes, backgrounds, responsiveness, etc. Without CSS webpages would be difficult to read.

HTML is short for Hypertext markup language and provides the structure of a page. It defines the different elements on the page such as paragraphs, headings, menus, and so on. It provides the building blocks for webpages as it’s standard for markup language.

PHP means Hypertext preprocessor. It’s a scripting language which is being executed on the server. With its help you can develop dynamic website, static websites, as well as web applications. All WordPress websites rely on PHP so that they could compile dynamic content taken from a database.

JavaScript, or sometimes called JS, is both a server-side side and client-side scripting language which makes webpages interactive.

Today we will talk about CSS. In order to understand this guide, it’s also helpful to have a basic idea of HTML. The reason is that CSS is used to style HTML documents.

Let’s use the following HTML document for this example:

The document would look like this in a browser if you are not using CSS:

What is CSS?

It’s a styling language which helps web designers and developers to have full control over how a webpage can look.

It is also used to help you define styles for webpages, such as layout, design, and variations in display for different screen sizes and devices.

It’s a very crucial language you need to learn if you wish to develop websites or make your own customizations.

What does it do?

In order to use CSS, you first need to understand its syntax. It’s not too complicated, so no need to worry. Here is an example of CSS:

As you can see there are several parts:

Body, h1, and p called selectors and they can be very useful if you wish to target specific elements in an HTML document. For example, the mentioned selectors can target body section, headings, and paragraphs in the HTML document.

Background colour, font family, colour, and font size are known as properties.

Centre, light blue, Verdana, and 20px are called values. Values are attached to properties, after which the value is passed to the HTML element.

For this example, the body section will be with a blue background, headings will be centered on the page and in white, and the font used for the paragraphs will be Verdana.

This is a basic example of CSS.

Adding CSS and HTML

This is considered relating to simple. You can do it in three different ways.

External CSS

It’s best to keep CSS and HTML code in separate files. You can then link to the CSS file with the help of element which needs to be placed inside the

section.
The first thing you need to do is create a CSS file. They usually end with a .css extension. In our case our files will be called style.css.

The second thing is adding the element to the

section of the document.

Internal CSS

If you wish add a unique style to one single webpage, you would be creating a simple one-page site, in which case you need to choose an internal style sheet.

The internal style sheet is added inside

As the CSS code is located in your HTML document, this could lead to larger webpages, especially if you have used tons of CSS code.

Inline CSS

This type of CSS is applied directly to a single element by adding the

However, this method can be time-consuming and redundant. Similar to internal CSS, this one leads to larger HTML files.

If you’re using WordPress, you can gain access to your themes CSS file by going to Appearance – Theme Editor from your dashboard.

This will lead you to the themes’ stylesheet.

Note, that WP does not recommend this approach as you can edit and preview CSS changes by using the built in CSS editor.

To access it, click on Appearances – Customize.

Now, go to Additional CSS from the left sidebar.

Another option is by going to the built-in CSS editor from Custom CSS.

This will lead you to the following editor:

Don’t forget to create a backup and use a child theme before you go playing around with your themes files, this includes the style sheet as well.

When should you use CSS?

There are a number of ways to use CSS.

8RWD – CSS responsive web design

RWD will make your website look great and be compatible with all devices. As more and more people go my mobile, you cannot ignore the importance of responsive design.

CSS is crucial when you are creating a responsive website. If you are looking to edit an old design for new devices, you can achieve this by using CSS.

CSS can be used in order to implement responsive grid views, viewports, images, media queries, and videos. Your website will look great on all devices, which will boost your conversion rates and engagement.

Styling

CSS is known as a styling language and is an excellent feature when you decide to do a custom style for your website. If there is no option to make changes to your website by using the same panel or live customizer, you can always use CSS.

It allows you to do a variety of customizations which includes background colours and images, typography, icons, texture, borders, margins, buttons, and pretty much everything else you have in mind.

How to create a consistent cross – browser experience?

If you are looking to create an HTML + CSS website from the beginning, you will face the problem with cross – browser compatibility. The reason is that each browser reads HTML specifications in a different way.

That’s the reason that different browsers will render one code in a different way. Another to eliminate these compatibility issues, you need to use a freely- available CSS file – normalize.css brought to you by Google. In order to implement this file, add the following line to your

section.

How to create CSS animations?

Previously, you had to rely on Flash or JavaScript to create animations. But things have changed, all thanks to the introduction of CSS transitions and animations.

In order to do this, however, be advised that you would need a more advanced level of CSS.

There are a lot of ways you can use transitions and animations on your website. One of the best examples is by adding interactivity intended to boost user engagement.

Conclusion

CSS might look difficult, but it’s actually one of the simplest languages you could learn. It’s not a programming language such as PHP, which is why it’s not that complicated.

Without CSS, websites would look terrible. They will be very difficult to style and with the help of CSS you can improve the usability and how your website looks.