CSS Minifier
With CSS minifier, you can minify CSS style files. With the CSS compressor, you can easily speed up your Web sites.
What is CSS minifier?
CSS minifier aims to shrink CSS files on websites. This concept, which is used as an English equivalent (CSS Minifier), includes an arrangement in CSS files. When CSSs are prepared, the main goal is for web site administrators or coders to analyze the lines correctly. Therefore, it consists of so many lines. There are unnecessary comment lines and spaces between these lines. This is why CSS files become very long. All these problems are eliminated with CSS minifier.
What does CSS minifier do?
Along with the changes made in the CSS files; dimensions are reduced, unnecessary lines are removed, unnecessary comment lines and spaces are deleted. Moreover, if more than one code is included in the CSS, these codes are also deleted.
There are various plug-ins and applications for these operations that most users can perform manually. Especially for people using the WordPress system, these processes can be automated with plugins. Thus, the possibility of making mistakes is eliminated and more effective results are obtained.
People who do not use WordPress for CSS or do not want to prefer existing plugins can also use online tools. By downloading the CSS to the online tools over the internet, it is possible to reduce the existing files in the CSS by making changes. After all the processes are finished, it will be enough to download the existing CSS files and upload them to the website. Thus, operations such as CSS Minify or shrinking will be completed successfully, and all possible problems that may be experienced through CSS for the site will be eliminated.
Why should you shrink your CSS files?
Having a fast website not only makes Google happy, it helps your website rank higher in searches and also provides a better user experience for your site visitors.
Remember, 40% of people don't even wait 3 seconds for your homepage to load, and Google recommends sites load within 2-3 seconds at most.
Compressing with the CSS minifier tool has many benefits;
- Smaller files mean your site's overall download size is reduced.
- Site visitors can load and access your pages faster.
- Site visitors get the same user experience without having to download larger files.
- Site owners experience lower bandwidth costs because less data is transmitted over the network.
How does CSS minifier work?
It's a good idea to back up your site's files before shrinking them. You can even take it a step further and shrink your files on a trial site. This way you make sure everything is up and running before making changes to your live site.
It's also important to compare your page speed before and after shrinking your files so you can compare the results and see if shrinking has had any effect.
You can analyze your page speed performance using GTmetrix, Google PageSpeed Insights, and YSlow, an open source performance testing tool.
Now let's see how to do the reduction process;
1. Manual CSS minifier
Shrinking files manually takes a significant amount of time and effort. So do you have time to remove individual spaces, lines and unnecessary code from files? Probably not. Apart from time, this reduction process also provides more room for human error. Therefore, this method is not recommended for shrinking files. Fortunately, there are many free online minification tools that allow you to copy and paste code from your site.
CSS minifier is a free online tool to minify CSS. When you copy and paste the code into the “Input CSS” text field, the tool minifies the CSS. There are options to download the minified output as a file. For developers, this tool also provides an API.
JSCompress , JSCompress is an online JavaScript compressor that allows you to compress and reduce your JS files up to 80% of their original size. Copy and paste your code or upload and combine multiple files to use. Then click “Compress JavaScript – Compress JavaScript”.
2. CSS minifier with PHP plugins
There are some great plugins, both free and premium, that can shrink your files without having to do manual steps.
- Merge,
- Minify,
- Refresh,
- WordPress Plugins.
This plugin does more than minify your code. It combines your CSS and JavaScript files and then minifies the files created using Minify (for CSS) and Google Closure (for JavaScript). Minification is done via WP-Cron so that it doesn't affect your site speed. When the content of your CSS or JS files changes, they are re-rendered so you don't have to empty your cache.
JCH Optimize has some pretty good features for a free plugin: it combines and minifies CSS and JavaScript, minifies HTML, provides GZip compression to combine files, and sprite rendering for background images.
CSS Minify , You only need to install and activate to minify your CSS with CSS Minify. Go to Settings > CSS Minify and enable only one option: Optimize and minify CSS code.
Fast Velocity Minify With over 20,000 active installs and a five-star rating, Fast Velocity Minify is one of the most popular options available for shrinking files. To use it, you only need to install and activate.
Go to Settings > Fast Velocity Minify. Here you will find a number of options for configuring the plugin, including advanced JavaScript and CSS exclusions, CDN options, and server information for developers. The default settings work fine for most sites.
The plugin performs shrinking on the frontend in real time and only during the first non-cached request. After the first request is processed, the same static cache file is served to other pages that require the same set of CSS and JavaScript.
3. CSS minifier with WordPress plugins
CSS minifier is a standard feature you'll usually find in caching plugins.
- WP Rocket,
- W3 Total Cache,
- WP SuperCache,
- WP Fastest Cache.
We hope that the solutions we have presented above have enlightened you on how to do the CSS minifier and you can understand how you can apply it to your website. If you have done this before, what other methods have you used to make your website faster? Write to us in the comments section on Softmedal, do not forget to share your experiences and suggestions to improve our content.