Ask HN: Removing Twitter Bootstrap CSS

I removed bootstrap at work (in favor of Bourbon and Neat). For context, I disagree with Bootstrap&#x27;s framework design decisions, our app had a 3000-line CSS override file, and we wanted to make our two-year-old web app responsive, so we decided to gut Bootstrap entirely. The process took a few months, including a whole redesign process.<p>For an existing app, you can&#x27;t just remove bootstrap and put in something new. As you probably realize by now, everything will just break.<p>Instead, you need to update individual pages along the way. This process is preferable to removing bootstrap and re-implementing your pages all in one giant pull request since it allows your team to QA iteratively.<p>For us, we redesigned our app, made it responsive, and also used another library in addition to removing Bootstrap. There was a lot more nuance involved, but for example, I started first by redoing the header and footer, then I moved onto individual pages. You can probably just start by re-implementing common mixins and modules first. Then you can move onto the actual templates and start removing your .rows and .span divs page-by-page.<p>I wrote about the process in depth here: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;medium.com&#x2F;anyperk-product-engineering&#x2F;anyperks-responsive-design-overhaul-with-bourbon-and-neat-8fd487bbce03" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;medium.com&#x2F;anyperk-product-engineering&#x2F;anyperks-resp...</a>

I&#x27;m not sure I understand what &quot;outgrown the usefulness&quot; means. Does that mean you have so many custom styles on top of Bootstrap that the underlying framework isn&#x27;t doing very much? If so, and you&#x27;re using LESS, then it shouldn&#x27;t be adding much overhead.<p>Another source of annoyance might be a large number of unused rules. I believe you can just remove the individual LESS files that Bootstrap provides that you don&#x27;t want. I personally use about 4 of the 10+ LESS files that Bootstrap offers (at least for a vanilla project).

It depends. What parts of Bootstrap are you using for the site? If you&#x27;re just using the grid system, there are plenty of drop-in replacements that work similarly. If you&#x27;re using form styling, typography styles and other Bootstrap helper styling, then it gets a little more tricky.<p>Approach it like you would any rewrite, tackle each part of your application as a separate modular component. Do the homepage, then static pages and so on until you have moved every page over from Bootstrap.

Are you using a custom bootstrap.less to only include and compile components that you need?<p>Why haven&#x27;t you upgraded to bootstrap 3? It could be a bit lighter when you consider the mixins for grids that it provides.