The first step on your way to a very fast website is object size minimization. What files must be minified? What are the best minimization techniques? How object size minimization will affect your visitors’ experience? Read our Website Performance Guide Step 1 to find the answers to all your questions.
What files should you compress? Well, in fact the right answer is – all the files. First, let’s start with text files. You must remove all the HTML & Javascript comments, line breaks, tabs. If you are going to do it manually, you are crazy – there are lots of automated tools that can do all the cleaning job.
You might have an objection – yes, it’s really painful to edit compressed in such a way files. The easiest and the most effective way is to keep 2 versions of every file, i.e. your local version of your site should be uncompressed, but before publishing it, you compress the files and only then upload to your FTP. Don’t forget to test the uploaded files after you’ve uploaded them – in some cases programs break JavaScript code and this may affect your website’s functionality. There are many tools to compress Javasctipt, CSS and HTML files, I’ll name here only a few:
- JSMin
- JavaScript::Minifier
- Dojo ShrinkSafe aka Rhino
- Dean Edwards Packer
- YUI Compressor
- CSSMin
- Minify
- YUI
- CSS Tidy
- CSS Minifier
After you’ve eliminated all unnecessary characters from your text files (usually you win 25-60%), your next steps are:
1. Compress your graphics
2. Enable GZIP compression
3. Use static compression (this will be discussed in my next post).
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