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!



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juanster2017 Premium
Thanks for the step by step training it is very helpful
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smartketeer Premium
Thanks for the time and the feedback Juan!
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BorisRoman Premium Plus
Thanks a lot, Zsolt!
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smartketeer Premium
Thank YOU!
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Jenny28 Premium
Wow, thank you for this! When it comes to site speed, I am always trying to improve. This will help me out for sure, thanks for the training.
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smartketeer Premium
Thank YOU!
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ShihTzuSteve Premium
Thanks for sharing this great tip and for showing us how to implement it.
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smartketeer Premium
Once again, thanks for the time Steve!
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CandP Premium
Thanks, Zed. We are really working on our page speed at the moment. Right now we are optimizing images but when we have finished this we were going to look closely at a minify program. This plugin looks nice and simple but it's still messing with code and that makes us nervous. Should we do a complete backup of our entire website before activating the plugin?
Colette and Philip
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smartketeer Premium
ALWAYS! That's a general rule. Why? Because literally speaking, any new plugin, changed option, etc is "messing with your code" ...
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CandP Premium
So the changes are made to the entire website as you activate and there is no going back, right?
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smartketeer Premium
No.

What I was trying to say: any new plugin/widget/setting/etc will alter your Wordpress database and/or your theme template files to add/modify a given function/feature.

And when you deactivate/uninstall the plugin, those changes will be removed automatically.

However, many things can go wrong (plugin conflicts, untested plugins, theme compatibility issues, etc) so is always better to create a full site backup before installing new things ...
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CandP Premium
Thanks for clarifying that. We will definitely do the backup. Thanks again, Zed.
Colette and Philip
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smartketeer Premium
Thank YOU!
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