Minification is the process of removing all unnecessary characters from the Javascript source code in your website and script files without altering the functionality of your website. It is one of the essential methods to minimize bandwith usage and load times on websites. Minification improves the accessibility and site speed incredibly, what gives the visitor a better experience while browsing through your website. Users accessing your website with only a limited amount of data can also save bandwidth while surfing on your pages. Want to know more about minification? Get in contact with us via the website.
Why use minification?
While creating the ideal source code in HTML, Javascipt or CSS files, developers tend to use comments, spacing and well-named variables to create the best readable codes for themselves. Extensive source code also helps other developers who might work later on your website. Although this is a great idea during the development phase, it doesn’t work well for the viewers of your website. Web browers and servers have to analyze the content of your website and files, and can do without well-structured code and comments. This will only generate more network traffic to your website without any functional benefit.
How to use minification?
To minify CSS, Javascipt and HTML files, you simply remove comments, whitespace and semicolons in the source code. Also, you can use shorter functions and variable names. This reduces the file size, in some cases up to sixty percent. Minification became standard practice amongst website developers. All the leading Javascript library developers as JQuery, bootstrap and AngularJS provide some sort of minified examples of their files. Usually these shorter versions are noted with an extension under min.js.
Check the source code after minification
Minification is important for the user experience of your website. Managing and performing minification can be difficult though. Manual minification can become vitual impossible when it comes to large files. Also, when you delete the wrong content, you might end up with a website that doesn’t work at all. There are some automated tools available, but even then it is essential to keep both development and production files seperate. To keep them also both in synch is very often difficult. We offer automated minification for your website, so that you are releaved of keeping the source code up to date. You keep the uncompressed, original files with source code on your main server, while we automatically create minified variants on the caching servers. This will accelate your page load times enormously without giving you any headaches about the source code. Want to know more about minification for your website? Get in contact with us via the website.