What do you think about these tools?

[HelenN]

Hi there,

I have just published a site about minifying html, css, javascript codes. It is here Minify and compress HTML, CSS, Javascript (JS) codes What do you think about these tools? Can it help website owners reduce size for their sites?

Any thoughts?

 

[TratynA4D]

It could help with the load time of the site I believe, since there isn't a enormous amount of code the OS has to process.

 

[Graybeard]

have fun when you need to edit a minified source code
\s or a whitespace is not that heavy really.
Do you have any bench tests that prove the speed increase? And that it is substantial not 0.1% ?

Images are a major bloat IMHO.
Also bootstrap and jquery are huge css files and you only use a small portion of their content -- they are so damn complex that you load the whole enchilada @400K+

 

[martinsmith]

Hi there,

I have just published a site about minifying html, css, javascript codes. It is here Minify and compress HTML, CSS, Javascript (JS) codes What do you think about these tools? Can it help website owners reduce size for their sites?

Any thoughts?

Useful share, thanks for posting...

 

[Claire Harbour]

Hi HelenN, I think code minification is one of those easy ways you can speed up a site. Google’s PageSpeed Insights nearly always recommends minifying. I'm not sure about the tangible results though, sometimes it has limited benefits.

When minifying you have to make sure you don't end up breaking things, as sometimes multiple files from different plugins can be concatenated. It is possible to use minification plugins as opposed to doing it manually (like Autoptimize) which is a great time saver.

I think it's best to keep a copy of original files on the server and make edits to that before re-minifying and overwriting the minified version (which is the one you'll call from other files) - it makes it a whole lot quicker as you're not scouring one line looking for what you need!

Sometimes you also need to look at a site's files and see what can be trimmed off, as Graybeard said some platforms like Bootstrap are quite large. In WordPress, it's quite easy/common to have useless plugins installed and active which add weight with no benefit. For me, I always prioritise compressing images though, as I find that's where you can get the best results.