Should my HTML, CSS, and JS be minified?

Minification can assist increase the performance of a website by reducing the size of HTML, CSS, and JS files, which can lead to faster download and rendering times for these files. However, if you are using a CMS (Content Management System) like WordPress, where this minification is required for each of the individual pages, it may prolong the time it takes for the initial visitor to these sites to fully load. However, the advantages of minification will be available to subsequent visitors.

Therefore, if your website receives at least a respectable volume of traffic, it may be a good idea to minify your website files. However, if your website only receives a small number of visits, depending on how your website is set up, it could not result in any obvious changes or it might occasionally have a detrimental impact on your website. In order to determine whether you should minify your CSS and JS files for your particular website layout, keep reading.

What Is Minification of HTML, CSS, and JS

Eliminating superfluous characters from these HTML, CSS, and JS files is known as minification. To make the codes easier for humans to read, these extra characters are only things like extra white space characters (like spaces and tabs from the keyboard), new line characters, and comments. Thus, minification doesn't mean getting rid of unnecessary codes. Executable code blocks that are contained in a file but aren't required for the webpage are referred to as unused codes in this context.

Does Minification Speed Up a Website?

Now that these HTML, CSS, and JS files have undergone minification, their size has decreased as a result of the removal of extraneous characters. As a result, these files are downloaded and rendered more quickly. Therefore, minification might increase the speed of your website.

However, this decrease in file size is often not very large, thus the final performance difference might not be particularly apparent.

Static Websites and Minification

If your website is static and doesn't need to be changed frequently, you can simply minify your HTML, CSS, and JS files once, then reuse those files until they need to be updated once more. Therefore, you don't need to invest any further time or resources as long as those minified files may be utilized again. Because of this, minifying HTML, CSS, and JS files may be a wise decision if your website is primarily static.

Website minification for dynamic sites

Basically, dynamic websites are ones whose content has to be created or altered dependent on the user accessing the webpage. As an illustration, if you go to a website like Facebook, Google, or another, you could see your name on the screen, but if someone else goes to the same page, they might see their name instead of yours.

Your website is dynamic by nature if you're using a CMS (Content Management System) like WordPress. You don't need to spend any time minifying those files because these CMS platforms handle it for you. However, this minification procedure requires part of your web server's processing capacity and takes some time to finish. Therefore, minification increases both the strain on your server and the time it takes for your webpages to load.

Because of this, you should think about whether your site will profit more from minification than it will cost. Here is a straightforward guideline to aid your decision-making. The advantages of minifying will outweigh the costs if you can reuse such compressed files repeatedly. As a result, the more times you can repurpose those minified files, the more advantages you will gain from them.

As a result of the quicker downloading and rendering times of those minified files, you will profit from employing minification if your site receives a lot of traffic. However, if your website only has a small number of visits, you might not see much of an improvement in the performance of the website due to the extra time needed to serve the initial visitor, which might potentially negatively impact the speed of your website.

Additionally, if your web server resources are really low, you might not want to utilize the minification because it will require some server resources. However, as long as your site is using caching, this shouldn't typically be a problem.

Can I minify my CSS and JS?

The CSS and JS files of dynamic websites are typically considered static files because they don't change all that frequently. As a result, you may minify the CSS and JS scripts just once and reuse the resultant files repeatedly. In order to reuse them during subsequent page views, CMS platforms like WordPress automatically preserve the minified CSS and JS files in the cache.

The same CSS and JS files may also be reused on all the other pages where they have been used, therefore just needing to minify them once will enough if they are used in numerous pages. That is to say, you may lose this benefit if you opt to mix your CSS and JS files. Because the combined file of one page may no longer correspond with the previously matched component files. In this tutorial, you may learn more about combining CSS and JS files.

Now, because you will be able to reuse the minified CSS and JS files, only the very first visitor to any webpage will encounter a little longer page load time but all the future visitors will enjoy a quicker page load speed. Also, this won't unduly overwhelm your server resources by consuming too much computing power. Because of this, it can almost always be a good idea to minify CSS and JS files.

Must I Minify My HTML?

Websites made with CMS platforms like WordPress have very dynamic HTML files. As a result, depending on who is accessing the page, the webpages need to be produced again each time. As a result, a page can need to load with different contents each time it loads. If so, you can't utilize the same HTML files to serve different visitors. Because of this, WordPress and other CMS platforms don't by default cache HTML files.

Even when you use a CMS, the majority of websites just display the same information to every visitor. In this situation, you may provide everyone access to the same HTML files. So, just like you might with any static files, you can minify those HTML pages and keep utilizing them.

Some websites may even have both of these attributes. Imagine that you own a website where users can log in. Then, since each user will have a unique name, you can't utilize the same webpage/HTML file for everyone when logged-in visitors visit the website and see their name on the websites. However, visitors who are not signed in view the identical material on the webpages since their names are not shown when they access the website. As a result, you may utilize the identical websites for every visitor that isn't signed in.

Now, until the minified HTML file is deleted from the cache or the cache expires, minification will only be necessary once per webpage if you can save the HTML file in the cache and reuse it for subsequent visits.

Therefore, minification will only be required once per webpage if your site uses HTML/full-page caching. Therefore, even though it may take a little longer for the initial visitor to a webpage to load, all future visitors will have a quicker page load time. Additionally, merely minifying pages once won't put an undue strain on your server's resources by consuming too much processing power.

However, if your website doesn't use HTML cache, minification will be required for every visitor to any of your webpages. Therefore, all of these minifications will inevitably slow down the loading of your webpages and will unnecessarily overtax your server's resources by consuming too much processing power. But all these will do no good for your website.

Because of this, minifying HTML files might be advantageous if your website uses HTML caching. However, if you don't use HTML caching, minifying HTML files will ultimately hurt your site's performance.

Do I Need to Minify in CDN?

If you are utilizing a reverse proxy CDN provider like Cloudflare that enables minification at their CDN, you may also perform this minification at the CDN level.

If you conduct the minification at your web server, the minification will only be necessary once per page. The minification will only be required once for each PoP, or Point of Presence, of the CDN provider if you handle it at the CDN level. This is due to the fact that most CDN providers don't automatically copy files from one CDN PoP to the others. Therefore, for each new visitor to a webpage from a different PoP, the same page will need to be minified.

Over 200 PoPs are used by Cloudflare. Therefore, rather than only once from your server, a webpage would need to be minified 200+ times if Cloudflare needed to serve it from one of their 200+ Points of Presence (PoPs). As a result, the page's 200+ first-time visitors will see a slower page load time.

Therefore, you should typically get better results from minification at the web server level as opposed to the CDN level.

Conclusion

In light of all of this, if you are using a CMS like WordPress and your website only receives a modest amount of traffic, you could be better off without minifying HTML, CSS, or JS files. However, employing minification might help you get better results if your website has at least a respectable volume of visits. You could still see comparable findings with or without minification, albeit the final outcome might not be especially noteworthy.