Is minifying worth it

Merge / Minify CSS & JS

How can CSS & Javascript Merging & Minification make or break a site

    Combining and/or Minifying Stylesheets and javascript files

    Code Minification Website Page Speed

    Javascript & CSS files are the pillar of any website, without them, a website is just plain and boring, but adding too much of css and javascript also causes website to load slow and may cause users to leave your website halfway due to poor responsiveness. So, the question here is: how would you get over it and how to fix the issue. The first choice of many developers around the world is to use some automated software that reads the website content and parses js & css files and create a new single file each for css & js with all the code to improve performance of the website thus allowing users to be able to surf the pages faster.

    While minifying the resources may help with speed, sometimes it causes more harm than good. An example would be where the jquery is being loaded after another script that is dependent on jquery for execution, or a css style order chance where a previous css class overtakes the current css styling. These are minor issues for a small website but if the website is huge and uses a lot of different components, it may become complex to get the minification even working.

    Also, there is always an overhead involved in post-processing a page. All the minification plugins use post-processing of the generated html and modify it on the go and regenerate a custom html file. This overhead usage of CPU and memory resources can cause issues with TTFB and may cause the server to go down under high user activity.

    For an big website or a website with huge amount of dynamic user activity, it is recommended to skip the js/css combining/minification route and optimize the original css and js files. And where possible, hand-code each component for speed. There is no straight answer of whether this technique will work for every website and is a “test and discover” thing. Please note that before making any changes to any website, we highly recommend to take proper website backups that will allow restoration of a working version of the website if anything goes wrong on the way.

    If you have a dynamic website and want it to load faster or improve Page Speed Grades, let ZycoonMedia know and we will optimize your website for improved performance.