Why your Figma files are slow and how to clean them up 🚀

Maksim Vazovski — Wed, 03 Jun 2026 12:33:16 +0000

Do you ever feel like your Figma file is moving in slow motion? I’ve been there. After a few weeks of intense design work, even the most powerful machines start to struggle with massive files, thousands of hidden layers, and broken instances.

As a designer starting my journey, I realized that manual cleanup is a nightmare. I started digging into how to keep things snappy, and here are my top tips to optimize your workflow:

•Delete invisible/hidden layers: Figma renders everything in the background If you aren't using a layer, delete it instead of just hiding it.

•Flatten complex vectors: If you have icons or illustrations with hundreds of paths, flatten them. It significantly reduces the rendering load on your browser.

•Organize your Styles & Components: Remove unused styles and detach instances that aren't part of your core design system to free up memory.

•Break down large files: If a file becomes too heavy, move separate sections into different files. Figma handles multiple smaller files much better than one "everything" file.

•Manual cleaning is helpful, but I got tired of doing it every single day. So, I decided to build a small utility to automate this process—LayerCleaner.

I’m currently in the early stages of building this, and I’d love to get some feedback from the community. If you’re also struggling with laggy files, you can check out the project and join the waitlist here: https://layercleaner.netlify.app/

I’m curious—what’s your #1 trick for keeping Figma fast?

DEV Community: Maksim Vazovski

Why your Figma files are slow and how to clean them up 🚀