Minification is the art of making a website as small as possible. Not onscreen but in the amount of data needed to be transferred between the webserver and the client.
You might think this is not as important nowadays as it was back in the days when we still used 14k4 modems but you’d be wrong. Minification is more important than ever.
When you minify your sourcecode you won’t just have saved bandwidth. You will also save your clients a lot of load time. Let me explain with one simple example. In a normal situation the parsing of your PHP/Python/Perl/Ruby code on the server takes up about 10% of the total load time for the client. If you can shave 50% off your parse times by optimising your code you save about 5% on total load time. Let’s be real, you can never save 50% off of your server times.
Let’s say you can save 50% off of your data transferred to the client, this is a realistic figure, you have saved 45% in load times! It’s easier if you follow some simple guidelines. These guidelines have already been written down by the Exceptional Performance Team at Yahoo. If you like paper more then reading your screen (like me) you can get the High Performance Websites book from O’Reilly.
Minification will be one of the main subjects to be written about on this weblog. It is something I like to talk about. It is also a simple subject with a huge impact on user experience. I like the little things that make a huge difference.