Save 24% With The Last Frontier of Minification: HTML!

As a web developer, front end developer, or web performance enthusiast (or all of those), it’s likely that you’re already minifying your JavaScript (or uglifying it) and most likely your css too.

Why do we do this?

We minify specifically to reduce the bytes going over the wire; trying to get our websites as tiny as possible in order to shoot them through the internet faster than our competitor’s.

We obsess over optimising our images, carefully choosing the appropriate format and tweaking the quality percentage, hoping to achieve the balance between clarity and file size.

So we have teeny tiny JavaScript; we have clean, minified, uncssed css; we have perfectly small images (being lazy loaded, no doubt).

So what’s left?…

The ever-overlooked … HTML minification!

Thats right! HTML! BOOM!

Seriously though; HTML may be the one remaining frontier for optimisation. If you’ve covered off all the other static files – the css, js, and images – then not optimising html seems like a wasted opportunity.

If you view the source of most websites you visit you’ll probably find line after line of white space, acres of indents, reams of padding, novels in the forms of comments.

Every single one of these is a wasted opportunity to save bytes; to squeeze the last few bits out of your HTTP response, turning it from a hulking oil tanker into a zippy land speeder.

Continue reading