How to Remove Dashicons from Genesis Theme

Nowadays, almost all themes come with an icon pack like Font Awesome. WordPress Genesis themes come preloaded with an icon pack called Dashicons. In this post I will discuss about how to Remove Dashicons from Genesis Theme. I will also showcase a data driven answer for effect of Dashicons on your website loading speed.

Icons packs mostly used to create eye-catching Social Sharing buttons, Call-to-Action buttons, bullet points or lists. Striking buttons provoke your visitor to click and help you in conversion, which is great.

But there is a downside of using these icon packs, it increases your webpage size significantly. And large size webpages are not good for loading speed and rankings.

Why you should Remove Dashicons from Genesis Theme

According to an analysis, Dashicons file of 29.3 KB size took 772 ms time to load, which is 19.18% of total loading time, where the total page size was about 400 KB.

Genesis Sample Website Loading Time Pingdom Result

Dashicons CSS File Loading Time Pingdom Result

Note – I chose Genesis’s own demo website ‘Genesis Sample’ for this exercise to avoid biasness. You may find slightly different results of similar exercise due to other factors such as location, internet speed, font files hosted on the same server or loading from a CDN etc.

How to Remove Dashicons from Genesis Theme

In order to Remove Dashicons from Genesis Theme, you need to add the given below code in functions.php file of your Genesis child theme. Don’t forget to back up your functions.php file before making any changes.

//* TN Dequeue Styles - Remove Dashicons from Genesis Theme
add_action( 'wp_print_styles', 'tn_dequeue_dashicons_style' );
function tn_dequeue_dashicons_style() { 
      wp_dequeue_style( 'dashicons' );
}

When we say content is the King, we should not forget that web page loading speed is the Queen. We have to maintain the web page size minimum and it should load with in a second or two.

It is totally up to your preference whether you wanted to Remove Dashicons from Genesis Theme or want to keep those fancy icons. If you cannot live without icons then I would recommend you to call your icons through a CDN.

Still in dilemma, I have written a detailed guide how loading Font Awesome impact your webpage loading speed and How you can remove it, read it here.

Did you found this information useful, are you planning to Remove Dashicons from Genesis Theme or it don’t bother you? Let me know in the comments section below.