Adhering to DOM Manipulation Best Practices

Follow industry guidelines to ensure performant, readable, and maintainable codebases

Photo by Matthew Fassnacht on Unsplash

With great power comes great responsibility. The same holds true when it comes to DOM manipulation in JavaScript. Inefficient practices could lead to sluggish websites, increased maintenance costs, and frustrated developers. Fortunately, adhering to established best practices helps avoid these pitfalls.

This piece covers crucial recommendations for writing robust, manageable, and speedy DOM scripts.

Prerequisites

Fundamental understanding of HTML, CSS, and vanilla JavaScript required. Readers unfamiliar with these subjects might find tutorials on Mozilla Developer Network (MDN), freeCodeCamp, or Udemy helpful.

1. Minimize Direct Manipulations

Directly changing the DOM carries considerable overhead. Thus, batch modifications together whenever possible. One way involves storing updates in an array then applying them concurrently outside loops. Consider this slow version:

Bad Example:

for (let i = 0; i < 100; i++) {
  const div = document.createElement('div');
  div.classList.add('class-' + i);
  div.innerText = 'Div Number:'…