One line of code. Thousands of classes.
No Build Step.

Tailwind Lite is a stripped back version of Tailwind - the popular utility-first CSS framework, that can be added to your site or app with a single line of code (as opposed to the usual setup steps that Tailwind requires).

The benefits of using Tailwind Lite are easy setup and a lower maintenance burden. The drawback is that Tailwind Lite does not enable all of the classes that regular Tailwind does.

  • Any class that contains square brackets is not included.
  • All of the included classes are listed here.
You should us Tailwind Lite if...
  • You find the process of setting up and running `npx tailwindcss` to be tedious and/or unnecessary.
  • You would prefer not to have the additional dependency of npm/npx in your codebase.
  • You mainly use Tailwind for it's utility classes, and rarely customize the default Tailwind setup.
You should use Tailwind Lite if the benefits from skipping the Tailwind tooling outweigh the drawbacks:
  • A slightly longer first-visit load time on slow connections.
  • Not having access to custom Tailwind classes
Tailwind Lite's file size is about 90kb (minified and gzipped). This is almost certainly larger than if you use Regular Tailwind. On regular connections this will take about half a second to download. On slow connections it will take about 5 seconds. This file will be downloaded only once by each user - for their first pageview. After that it will load instantly. In other words, the speed/performance hit is minor, only happens on the first pageview, and is only noticeable on slow connections.