Minification is the process of minimizing code and markup in your script files and web pages. It is one of the standard ways to reduce bandwidth usage and accelerate page load times.
Minification enhances the user experience by significantly improving site speed and accessibility. It also benefits users accessing your site through a limited data plan who wish to save their bandwidth usage while surfing the web.
Minification has become standard practice for page optimization. Additionally, all major JavaScript library developers (jQuery, AngularJS, Bootstrap, etc.) provide minified versions of their files for production deployments, usually denoted with a “min.js” name extension.
Why Should You Minify Code?
When creating HTML, CSS, and JavaScript (JS) files, developers use comments, white space, and long, coherent names for variables. They are making code and markup legible for themselves and others who might work on the files later.
Although their coding techniques work in the development phase, they create extra network traffic without providing any functional benefit when it comes to serving your pages. Besides, web browsers and servers don’t need them to parse file content.
Developers must remove comments and extra spaces and crunch variable names to minimize code and reduce file size. The minified file version provides the same functionality while reducing the bandwidth of network requests.
Can You Automate Minification?
Minification plays a significant role in front-end optimization (FEO). FEO is a set of tools and techniques that reduce file sizes and the quantity of related web page requests.
While it is necessary, minification can be challenging. Therefore, manual minification is a bad practice and is almost impossible with large files. Even using automated tools can be challenging, as it means maintaining separate production and development file versions. Also, keeping them synchronized is difficult.
However, a Content Delivery Network (CDN) provides automated minification so that you keep your original, uncompressed files on your central server. At the same time, the CDN
