Improving Google Page Speed by minifying JS is a good step to improving your SEO.
Having the fastest page speed is something that everyone wants, but only a few get. This year page speed is becoming more important as it impacts your site performance in several ways. Specifically, it affects SEO ranking on Google, paid ads, and the user experience on your site. On the other hand, a slow speed will only frustrate the users, reduce your site’s organic traffic and provide a poor user experience. But getting the fastest page speed is pretty challenging.
Google Lighthouse Pagespeed reports that unminified javascript files come in the way of your page speed. That’s where the term minify comes in.
In this post, We will explore everything you need to know about minifying javascript and why it is so important for your site’s health and speed. Then finally, you will learn the most accurate ways to minify javascript files on your WordPress site.
Are you ready?
What is Javascript Minification?
If you ever have worked on the back end of a WordPress website, you see various files containing the code for the site’s functioning. Since human beings write these files, they have wide white spaces for making them easier to read. Consequently, the files become bigger and take extra time to load. To make the site faster, we need to optimize these files. That’s what is called modification.
Minification of javascript files is largely the process of removing all the unnecessary characters from the code, such as extra spaces, line breaks, unwanted comments, etc. This reduces the overall size of the files, and the website enhances the page speed and loads it faster than ever. Basically, minification is a way to optimize your WordPress site to make it lightweight and fast loading.
Why is Minifying Javascript Important?
Minification is all about boosting page speed and site performance. It reduces the file sizes on your site and makes the downloading process faster, enhancing the page loading speed. The reason why minification is so important is it improves the page speed, improves your site performance, provides a better user experience and ultimately helps to get rank higher on Google.
One of the added benefits of minification, it obscures your code from casual onlookers. It makes your code harder to read for malicious users or competitors snooping at your websites code. So if that’s something you’re worried about, thankfully, minification can help you in this. So if you want to make your site fast and efficient, it would be an ideal option to get started.
How to Minify Javascript on your WordPress Site?
Minifying the javascript files on your site is the same as minifying CSS files but with different tools. Thanks to various JS libraries and WordPress plugins, you don’t need to be a developer or programming language expert to minify the files on your site. It is pretty easy and effortless to work with these tools. All you need to do is just carefully follow the instructions, and you will be amazed by the results. For your convenience and ease, I have listed some helpful tools that work perfectly.
Autoptimize – Optimize your website with Autoptimize. It may aggregate, minify, and cache scripts and styles, as well as inlines critical CSS by default but can also inline essential CSS and defer the aggregated overall CSS, scripts, and styles to the footer. It also moves and defers scripts to the footer while minifying HTML. (https://wordpress.org/plugins/autoptimize/)
Fast Velocity Minify – The tool is intended for serious and expert users. It includes a number of features that can boost your website’s load speed, including: CSS & JS optimization, HTML & CSS optimization, image optimization, page speed analysis with SiteSpeed Insights (powered by YSlow), keyword research tools to help you optimize your site’s pages and content. (https://wordpress.org/plugins/fast-velocity-minify/)
Merge + Minify + Refresh – Gathers together and combines Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) and JavaScript files. The resulting files are then minified using Minify (for CSS) and Google Closure (for JS – fallback to Minify when not available). WP-Cron is used to minimize the files, ensuring that your website does not slow down as (https://wordpress.org/plugins/merge-minify-refresh/)
Better WordPress Minify – Allows WordPress’s output buffer, which respects the order of CSS and JS files as well as their dependencies, this plugin utilizes the PHP library Minify. BWP Minify is a highly configurable and simple-to-use tool (https://wordpress.org/plugins/bwp-minify/)
Minify the Files Manually
As well as using tools you can also minify the files manually. Not only should this help with your site’s loading time, but it should also give you peace of mind that nothing is being missed out on.
Closure Compiler – Closure Compiler is an excellent tool from Google developers that allows you to minify javascript files on your sites. What is amazing about this tool is that it enables the user to optimize the code as he wanted. For example, if you want only to remove white spaces only, you can choose the option in the optimization. Just enter the URL and optimize the code as you wanted.
Javascript-minifier.com – This is another simple, quick, and easy tool to minify javascript files on your site. All you need to do is to copy and paste the code and click on the minify button. They also allow you to download the output code file for more convenience.
Jscompress.com – In this javascript compressor, you can minify the code by copy and paste the code. But the amazing thing about this tool is its unique feature that allows you to compile various javascript files at once. So you can combine multiple files into one file for enhancing your page speed.
There are some other amazing tools that allow you to minify more than one type of code, such as CSS, Javascript, HTML, and even PHP. If you plan to minify different kinds of code on your site, these would be an ideal option for you. Here are some best tools that I have tried.
Need Help?
Know your websites slow and worried about Google reducing your visibility due to JS or Jquery scripts and other speed-related errors. Book in a call to talk to us today or book one of our free speed checks or paid speed audits.
