Minification often referred as minify is the process of removing all unnecessary characters from source code, without changing its functionality. Minify is most commonly applied on JavaScript (JS) and CSS files.
Since Minification removes unnecessary characters from code to reduce its size this will definitely improve load time.
When CSS/JS code is minified all comments are usually removed. Also characters like space, new line, and tab will be removed if found unnecessary.
Minification is usually done before doing Compression of CSS/JavaScript using GZIP/DEFLATE compression to improve website load time and is an important step in website optimization.
You can refer the 7 steps to Speed up website loading – Website Optimization Tips and also how to speed up websites by enabling .htaccess Caching using mod_expires and mod_headers.
Minification can be considered as one way of obfuscation but may not be the kind of obfuscation you are looking for.
Free Tools to Minify CSS and JS (javaScript) files.
JSMin
JSMin is one of the respected Minification and optimizer tool for JavaScript. JSMin removes comments and unnecessary white-spaces from JavaScript files. It typically reduces file size by half, resulting in faster downloads and thus reducing the time taken to load a web page.
Read more about JSMin Minify tool.
Minify
Minify Combines, minifies, and caches JavaScript and CSS files on demand to speed up page loads.
Minify is a PHP5 app that helps you to do Minification of JavaScript JS files and CSS files.It combines multiple CSS or JavaScript files, removes unnecessary white space and comments, and serves them with gzip encoding and optimal client-side cache headers.
The popular wordpress plug-ins WP-Minify and W3 Total Cache uses Minify.
Read more about JSMin Minify tool
YUI Compressor
The YUI Compressor is JavaScript minifier designed to be 100% safe and yield a higher compression ratio than most other tools.Starting with version 2.0, the YUI Compressor is also able to compress CSS files by using a port of Isaac Schlueter’s regular-expression-based CSS minifier. The YUI Compressor is written in Java and it requires Java 1.4 or greater versions.You can type java -jar yuicompressor-x.y.z.jar
from the command line to start the program.
Download the YUI Compressor.
Read more about YUI Compressor.
ShrinkSafe
ShrinkSafe is a JavaScript Minification application. It can typically reduce the size of your scripts by a third or more, depending on your programming style. ShrinkSafe is based on Rhino, a JavaScript interpreter.
Read try and download ShrinkSafe.
WP Minify – WordPress Minify Plugin
WP Minify plugin integrates the Minify engine which is described above into your WordPress blog. Once enabled, this plugin will combine and compress JS and CSS files to improve page load time.WP Minify grabs JS/CSS files in your generated WordPress page and passes that list to the Minify engine. The Minify engine then returns a consolidated, minified, and compressed script or style for WP Minify to reference in the WordPress header.
DOWNLOAD WP Minify WordPress plugin
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