Topcoat – Lightning-fast CSS Framework Developers Will Love

When picking a frontend framework you’ll usually look at aesthetics first. And don’t get me wrong, aesthetics are important!

But your website’s performance is crucial to usability just as much as the design of your page. For many frameworks like Bootstrap, you can only pick performance or design, rarely both.

Topcoat is different. It’s designed with usability in mind while focusing heavily on performance. In fact, Topcoat has been tested for performance and every new component runs speed trials to ensure the fastest load time.

Read Also: How To Measure Front-end Website Performance

The cool thing about Topcoat is that it doesn’t feel too lightweight or minimalist either.

You still have access to a huge library of components from buttons to tabs, checkboxes, form fields and on/off switches(among many other elements).

The library comes with a CSS and JS file that you just include in your page to get working. Nothing too complex, and certainly no more complex than Twitter’s Bootstrap.

Granted the components library may feel smaller than Bootstrap’s and it is meant to be lighter. However, the page structure is superb making Topcoat a brilliant framework for brand new sites that care about speed first.

Topcoat uses BEM naming conventions, one of many popular CSS writing styles made to organize your code. This may be tough to learn if you want to expand Topcoat’s stylesheet, but it’ll clear up your coding process quite a bit.

Also with Topcoat you get full access to their PSD files if you want to edit or redesign any of the page’s components. Pretty cool!

Everything from custom styles to custom icon sets comes packaged with Topcoat. It’s the cleanest frontend framework you’ll find with a clear focus on performance.

To learn more visit the Topcoat website and be sure to check the main GitHub repo for setup instructions + download links to the source files.

You can also share your thoughts with the team on their Twitter account @topcoat.