Let's start with the obvious question: what is minification and why is so important?

To put it shortly: minification is a method that will allow you to make your website file(s) smaller, by removing empty lines, white spaces, unnecessary characters, etc from the original source code of your webpage.

The goal is to eliminate any unnecessary bytes from the source code by deleting extra spaces, indentation and line spaces while maintaining the readability of the code. The process will reduce the overall size of your website core and front-end files. It's recommended/used for HTML, CSS and Javascript files that are sent to user’s browsers.

The most important benefit is obvious: compact files are faster to load and the result is better page speed. But there are many other benefits: reduced network latency, fewer HTML requests, enhanced compression, faster parsing, browser downloading and execution ...

And many "experts" will tell you that the actual performance improvement is very small and not worth the trouble ... I strongly disagree! Yes, there are many other optimization factors that can give you an even bigger boost ... For example, image optimization ... Still, when it comes to speed optimization, we are talking about a LOT of different factors and the final, cumulated effect is the result of many small improvements!

And believe me, it may seem a small tweak, but minifying your code can actually drastically improve your loading time! The proof? You simply can't achieve a 100/100 score on GTMetrix, Google Pagespeed or other speed testing platforms without minifying your HTML, CSS and JavaScript code.

This is is why I've decided to create this short tutorial where I will show you how to easily minify your HTML, CSS and Javascript files in order to improve the performance and the speed of your Wordpress website.

Interested?

Let's do this!