Google and other search engines look at several factors to evaluate and rank your site. One of these is your page loading time. This is perhaps one of the most crucial metrics to pay attention to, as it’s also an important factor in how your visitors will judge your site, too – particularly when it comes to first impressions.
Naturally, your website will have a large number of files including CSS, HTML and JavaScript. This code needs to be as clean, concise and fast as possible in order to avoid taking eons to load.
Of course, this code has been created to by read by humans, and therefore includes formatting, white space and comments which computers don’t really need in order to understand.
The good news is that this can be fixed with a little bit of knowledge and the right tools in order to “minify” your site. If you’re confused as to what this is, fear not: we’re about to take a look at how minifying works.
What it is to minify, and why you should do it?
Put simply, to “minify” is to remove any characters that aren’t required for your code to execute. This results in faster page loading, which makes search engines and visitors alike happy.
The most common unwanted pieces of code encompass comments, block delimiters, new line characters and white-space characters. Removing these snippets of code results in cleaner, smaller code which can be interpreted much quicker, and there are even online tools to help you do it.
Should I manually minify my code?
It’s entirely possible to minify your own code if you desire, but it’s not particularly recommended. There’s often too much scope for error, and even though unnecessary spaces might seem easy enough to spot, a simple mistake could result in your site going down – meaning hours of web design down the drain.
Minifying is not for the faint-hearted, and if you’re in any way uncomfortable with editing JavaScript it might be worthwhile consulting a web design Dallas firm to take the complication out of the job.
