Minify CSS

In this article, I want to talk about what minification of HTML and CSS code is, what it is for, and how to accomplish it. Structuring the code into blocks, lines, etc. is necessary for the convenience of human readability. We perceive such blocks as a whole, we see where the tag opens, where it closes. For browsers this is not necessary, they read the code sequentially, and unnecessary line breaks, spaces, comments in the text only make it difficult to read and increase the page load time. Thus, there are two main reasons for the need to minify the code: Reducing the size (weight) of the page and, as a consequence, increasing the speed of its loading. The second reason follows from the first. This is an improvement in behavioral factors. If the site loads faster, then there is a lower bounce rate, traffic growth, increase in search results, etc.

Currently, there are a huge number of web tools for optimizing CSS files. Most of them have their own algorithm of work (there are, of course, duplicates). The effectiveness of the programs themselves is also significantly different. In addition, some optimizers can break CSS code, after which the styles become invalid. Minification of CSS files (not to be confused with CSS compression) involves removing any unnecessary characters from the file to reduce its size and thus speed up loading. Minifying and compressing CSS files are not the same thing. Both of these methods are designed to reduce load times though. The difference lies in how they work. Compression is used to reduce file size using compression algorithms such as Gzip or brotli. The files are compressed before being sent to the client.