![]() However, with more complex web pages, CSS files are more extensive, and visitors could notice a longer load time. No, this isn't necessarily a problem for simple web pages with little CSS. This is why CSS is called a "render blocking" resource. Users don't see page content until the browser has processed all linked CSS. When the browser runs into a link to an external CSS file, it pauses HTML parsing to process the external CSS code. ![]() Once the browser downloads a web page, it parses its HTML file top-to-bottom before displaying it. The second reason connects to how browsers render website pages. First, smaller files take less time and resources to fetch and compress in the origin server, send to the client, and finally download by the browser, simply because there's less information to tackle. There are two main ways that CSS minification achieves this. Almost 70% of consumers state that page speed impacts their willingness to purchase from an online retailer. This allows you to delight website visitors with fast load times. The basic principle is simple: The less code there is to process, the less time it takes to load the web page. Website owners mainly choose to minify CSS to increase their page speed. For example, HTML and JavaScript, the other two foundational languages of the web, also follow visual formatting conventions and can be minified. It's possible to apply minification to other languages too. As a marketer, this is always your main priority. And the best part? It will help your website improve user experience by boosting load speed to delight visitors. It's less readable to us, but it looks (and works) the same to a computer. ![]() Here's what the CSS example above looks like after minification:īody These efforts aim to shrink the file even more. Additionally, when you minify CSS, you may alter the code in various ways, such as shortening variable names and deleting redundant or unused information. And, as you may have already guessed, larger files equate to more time and resources required to process the files.Ĭonsequently, website visitors will get the impression that your website or application is slow - not exactly delivering the exceptional user experience they desire.Īnd that's where CSS minification comes in - it removes extra code and results in a smaller CSS file that works identically to the original. The result is a CSS file that's larger than it needs to work properly. While parsing the files, it ignores these extra whitespaces and comments. While this makes things more digestible for us, the browser doesn't require any of this information to run the CSS code. You may notice that this code contains spaces, indents, comments, and line breaks. But they're extra because the browser and target platform do not need them to run. These effectively boost productivity, assist debugging, and make the CSS code easier to maintain. So, what exactly do we mean by "unneeded code?" With CSS (and most other coding languages), developers have introduced formatting and syntactic best practices to make the code more readable by humans. By stripping unnecessary data from the CSS code, minification helps the browser download and process these files faster, increasing page performance and improving user experience. ![]() CSS minification is the process of removing unneeded code from CSS source files, with the goal of reducing file size without changing how the CSS file executes in the browser.
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