css best practices - combining all css into a single stylesheet?

Question

I read somewhere that -

You should put all CSS (files) into one single stylesheet

Question -

1) Is it good practice? if yes, then why?

Answer 1

You should combine all your CSS into one file to reduce the amount of requests made to your server.

A similar topic is sprite sheets, the combination of multiple images into one large image to also reduce the amount of requests made to your server.

You'll find that loading 100x 5kb files is a lot slower than loading a single 500kb file.

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When you're ready to upload your files to a live environment, you should also consider compressing your CSS and JavaScript files. There are a vast amount of online tools for this, eg:

• CSS Compressor.
• JavaScript Compressor.
• HTML Compressor.