🚀 Why I Stopped Using Bootstrap - My Personal Vision as a Developer

When I tried using Bootstrap for the first time, it felt like magic.

After years of writing long lines of HTML and CSS, I suddenly found myself just writing a class name inside a tag. It was easy, it was fast. But was it the ideal approach?

As usual, I did my research and read a lot. Here’s what I discovered.

Today, I want to explain why I stopped using Bootstrap. Yes — I removed it from all my projects.

Actually, I’m obsessed with performance in my projects. Unfortunately, Bootstrap can reduce web page performance. Let me explain.

Technically, when you import a Bootstrap component, you also import:

• Grid system

• Buttons

• Alerts

• Forms

• Utilities

• Helpers

• JS components

• …and more

But you might only need the Grid and Buttons. The full CSS bundle still loads—and sometimes the JS bundle too. This happens for every Bootstrap element. The result? Extra kilobytes, extra parsing time, extra repaints.

I also discovered that Bootstrap’s JS includes many features you may never use: collapse, modals, tooltips, carousels, dropdowns… all loaded even if you need only one.

This feels like a waste of resources. For me, users’ time and performance matter more than convenience.

Before writing this article, I shared my idea with ChatGPT. It suggested that Bootstrap can reduce development time. That’s true—but it depends on the scenario. Imagine you have 10 elements with the same style. With Bootstrap, you must write the class for each one. With HTML and CSS, you can write the style once in your CSS file for a tag, class, or ID.

Today, with all these LLMs and AI agents that can assist your coding, you don’t really have a reason to say “I don’t have time.” If you ask for my opinion, I think learning prompt engineering to increase your productivity is far more valuable than learning Bootstrap and memorizing all those class names.

I can’t force you to drop Bootstrap. But I encourage you to research, read, and level up your knowledge.

 

I also remember that on the 31st of October 2017, Netflix returned to simple HTML, CSS, and vanilla JS for some pages instead of using React. They realized that using heavy frameworks everywhere can hurt performance.

Let’s take inspiration from big companies.

Finally, I want to say that building your own custom components is much better than copy-pasting. Be creative — and thank you for reading this far!