Minify Definition :
Minifying / Minification is the process of compressing a file without changing any of the functionalities by removing unwanted spaces, new lines, comments from its content there by reducing the file size and improving page load time.
This process will make the content in the file unreadable but every functionality of the code will remain unchanged.
Minification and Search Engine Optimization :
SEO is not just about keywords and links, it is more than that. Google has over 200 signals based on which a particular page ranks above other. Surely, Improving your page load time would be one of the factors for SEO. It not only improves your blogs SEO performance but also improves conversion factors which in turn again can be SEO factor.
How to Minify CSS ?
CSS Minification is one of the many aspects of improving page speed and is one of the most common practices by many webmasters, If you haven’t heard of it then it is the right time to know about it and practice it. Here is the way how we minify CSS code of our website.
There are different CSS compression techniques like
You can manually compress your CSS by copying the stylesheet of your blog/website and paste it in the online compressor applications whose links are given above and they will give you the compressed CSS code.
Most of the above compressors are also available to download in the form of Plugins for your wordpress blog.
How to Minify Javascript ?
You might have understood from the word “Minify Javascript”, here in this process we will minify javascript of our blog / website. There are number of compressors available for Javascript like
There can be number of javascript files that your blog is loading, combining them will reduce the number of requests which will reduce number of HTTP requests and compressing them using the above compression techniques will reduce the size there by improving page load time.
As said you can manually combine all your javascript files into a single file and compress them using any online tool or you can use plugins that serve your purpose.
Additional Information :
The plugin W3 Total Cache for wordpress users will have minify option as one of its feature, You can use this plugin to Minify CSS and Javascript of your blog.
Thanks for the great post. For minifying my JavaScript files, I prefer the online tool on blimptontech.com They use UglifyJS to get the compression done. Which gives you a little obfuscation as well. One cool other feature that I have started to use a bunch is the combining of JS files. You can easily upload a bunch of files, it adds them all to a single one, then minifies the JS.