Bandwidth usage has always been critical to the success of a website; remember the good old days of 56K modems? We've come a long way since then, but this is still no excuse for producing sites that swallow bandwidth like it's going out of fashion!

A part of this comes in the form of linting and minifying our style sheets before deploying into production use—it goes without saying that this should form part of any developer's workflow process by default. We can do this manually, but this manual job is prone to missing opportunities, which can lead to inconsistencies in our code.

Instead, we can use the power of PostCSS to perform the heavy lifting for us; the stylelint and cssnano plugin packs make for a powerful optimization facility! If we take a careful look at most gulp task files that we've created throughout the course of this book, both processes are taking place; in this example, stylelint is used at line 22, and cssnano at line 38: