When building websites from scratch, one of the most time-consuming aspects can be making sure that your website is responsive from top to bottom. Everything must look top notch for smaller viewports as more and more people around the world continue to access websites on their mobile devices. A website that is not easy to view and use on mobile devices can really tank not only the user experience, but also SEO rankings. Using libraries like Bootstrap can make this a lot quicker. The Bootstrap library is built on CSS Grid, which means that it is also very helpful in making websites more responsive. So the question is, if Bootstrap is built on CSS Grid, why would I want to just use CSS Grid?

It turns out, Bootstrap can often be very rigid and difficult to override when you want to make customizations outside of Bootstrap’s built in stylings. Sometimes figuring out how to make changes can be a time sink in and of itself. This is why for many scenarios I will choose to use CSS Grid. By accessing the capabilities of CSS Grid directly, you can have more control over your user interfaces. But you can use both! Bootstrap’s library includes several really useful components that will make adding functionality to your website a lot quicker. From accordions to navbars with hamburger menus and so much more, Bootstrap can take a lot of the groundwork out of some of those quality-of-life programming aspects that still take up a significant amount of time to code. So next time you build a project from scratch, consider using both CSS Grid AND Bootstrap.