Minify CSS and JS
What is Minified JS?
When coding in JavaScript, minified means that the code was written in JavaScript but extremely reduced in size by removing extra stuff like spaces, comments, and sometimes even renaming variables to keep it functional.
So, for instance, a very long function that you could have written in several lines will be reduced to one line. It will help in loading the websites faster, thus saving user data and making it good for user experience, especially on mobile devices. Most surprisingly, even most of the major libraries come in a minified version, for example, jQuery: jquery-3.1.1.min.js, to save space.
What is Minified CSS?
Minified CSS is a compacted version of the Cascading Style Sheets code, all spaces, comments, and other infographics that do not add directly to its functionality are removed. This speeds up the loading of web pages, reducing the consumption of data in the process and leading to successful search engine results. It’s pretty cool because CSSNano does it automatically for developers, which is a big time saver.
What does JS & CSS Minifier do?
A minifier for JS and CSS is a handy tool that can help reduce the file size of JavaScript and CSS code. It achieves this by omitting any irrelevant pieces. This could range from white spaces, comments, or sometimes even names of variables if they can be made shorter. In turn, the code will remain functional.
For example, a normal JavaScript function appears to be distributed across multiple lines with spaces and comments. It will compress to a single line. This could bring down file sizes by 30-90%, thereby increasing the load speed of your site.
Why should you Minify JS and CSS?
On the matter of web performance, the minification of JS and CSS is highly critical. Smaller files download faster, which means downloading a page and hence reduces the bouncing rates.
Moreover, that helps in search engine optimization indirectly, since search engines prefer sites under heavy traffic scenarios at a low bandwidth, which in turn reduces the cost. Other than that, combining files results in fewer HTTP requests and makes the minified code harder to steal, therefore providing some protection.
Why should you use minified code?
Minified code on production ensures the fastest experience for the users, transferring the minimum file size. However, it’s better to develop with non-minified code, in view of reading and debugging. This difference is a best practice in web development to ensure that production is done with performance and, at the same time ensuring productivity during creation.
Best Practices and Tips for Effective Minification
Establishing that the main objective of minification can be achieved by adhering to these best practices:
- Minify Only in Production: Use uncompressed code for writing during development so that you can read it easily and debug any errors. Minification should be part of the production build process, as prescribed by Google Developers.
- Thorough Testing: A staging environment is the best place to ensure your minified code works perfectly because it has many other run-time error guards, which helps a lot, especially when JavaScript usage is heavy in applications.
- Combine with Other Optimizations: There are many ways to optimize a website, and one of them is by minification. It is suggested in related articles that talk about gzip compression, browser caching, and image optimization for better performance.
- Use Reliable Tools: To ensure reliability and prevent error introduction, it’s advisable to utilize well-known minifiers such as UglifyJS, CSSNano, or Clean CSS.
