Why is Bootstrap the go-to for web developers?

Why is Bootstrap the go-to for web developers?

Let’s break the advantages down into 8 parts:

1. Bootstrap’s Responsive Grid

No more spending hours coding your own grid—Bootstrap comes with its own grid system predefined!

Now, you can get straight to filling your containers with content.

Defining custom breakpoints for each column is a snap using their extra small, small, medium, large, and extra large breaks. You can also simply stick to the default as it might already meet the needs of your site.

2. Bootstrap’s Responsive Images

Bootstrap comes with its own code for automatically resizing images based on the current screen size. Just add the .img-responsive class to your images, and the predefined CSS rules take care of the rest.

Let Bootstrap resize your images for you!

It can even change the shape of your images with the addition of classes like img-circle and img-rounded, and that’s without going back and forth between the code and your design software.

3. Bootstrap’s Components

Bootstrap comes with a whole barrelful of components you can easily tack onto your web page, including:

• Navigation bars
• Dropdowns
• Progress bars
• Thumbnails

…and more!

Not only is it a breeze to add eye-catching design elements to your webpage, you’ll also be able to rest assured knowing that every one of them will look great no matter the screen size or device used to view them.

That’s a lot of ready-made functionality right at your fingertips!

For a more complete list of addable features, check out the component documentation.

4. Bootstrap’s JavaScript

Still not enough functions? Try JQuery!

Bootstrap also allows developers to take advantage of over a dozen custom JQuery plugins. JQuery gives you even more room to play with interactivity, offering up easy solutions for modal popups, transitions, image carousels, and—one of my personal favorites—a plugin called scrollspy, which automatically updates your navigation bar as you scroll through a page.

5. Bootstrap’s Documentation

Bootstrap’s documentation is some of the best I’ve ever seen. Every piece of code is described and explained in explicit detail on their website.

Explanations also include code samples for basic implementation, simplifying the process for even the most beginner of beginners. All you need to do is choose a component, copy and paste the code into your page, and tweak from there.

6. Bootstrap’s Customizability

One of the main critiques when it comes to frameworks such as Bootstrap is their size—the weight they throw around can really slow down your application upon first load. The current version of Bootstrap’s CSS file, for example, is a whopping 119 KB. While this may not seem especially large compared to image and video files, for a CSS file, that’s enormous!

What Bootstrap allows you to do to combat this, however, is customize which functionality you want to include in your download. By simply going to their customize and download page, you can check off the features you won’t need for your application, trimming the weight off your file and saving your users the additional load time.

Customization is key!

7. Bootstrap’s Community

As with so many open-source projects, Bootstrap has a large community of designers and developers behind it. Being hosted on GitHub makes it easy for developers to modify and contribute to Bootstrap’s codebase. It also makes it easy for people to collaborate, lend their advice, and interact with peers and fellow users.

Bootstrap has an active Twitter page, a Bootstrap blog, and even a dedicated Slack room. And that doesn’t even get into the wealth of developers willing to help with technical problems on Stack Overflow, where all questions can be found under the bootstrap-4 tag.

8. Bootstrap’s External Templates

As the popularity of Bootstrap grew, people started creating templates based on Bootstrap in order to accelerate the web development process even further. There are many websites out there dedicated to sharing and buying custom templates based on Bootstrap.