Use the Minify Drupal module to maximize your website speed

One of the unbreakable laws of marketing is: the faster the website, the more profit it brings to its owner. Everything’s easier — a fast website is appreciated by visitors and search engines, hence the higher traffic and conversion. Website performance optimization also has its own unbreakable laws, one of which is: the lighter the website, the more speed it gains. That’s why, alongside other speed-enhancing tips like improving your caching or moving your JS and CSS to the footer, we want to describe the option of minifying your website’s files, and how to use the Minify Drupal module as a handy tool to do it.

Minifying your Drupal website’s files: the goal and essence

By minifying your website’s files, you will reduce their loading time. Minifying means getting rid of some unessential characters in these files, for example, white spaces, line breaks or comments. This procedure will not harm the files’ efficiency, it will just make them as compact as possible. The only drawback of minification is that the code becomes a little less readable, though it is still absolutely valid.

File minification and file compression

File minification is not the same as file compression, although it may enhance the effect of the latter, as well as of other website performance optimization manipulations which can usually go hand in hand. As far as compression is concerned, files are sent from the server to the client in a compressed way, and then get uncompressed.

The Minify Drupal module: one of the handy minification tools

Since Drupal’s mission is to handle even the largest websites without performance losses, it has plenty of tools for file minification. Among them is the Minify Drupal module.

The Minify module is designed to minify your HTML and JavaScript files. It works according to the principle described above, reducing the number of characters in the files to make them smaller for the sake of your site’s performance.

In order to minify JavaScript, the module uses the power of the famous web service — GOOGLE Closure Compiler. The Minify Drupal module is suitable even for modifying core and custom JavaScript. Its other benefit is that it has no Drupal version restrictions. The Minify works well together with the Boost module.

A quick guide to use the Minify module from its creators

• After installing and enabling the module, select Minify HTML and Use Minified JavaScript files in its performance settings on the Configuration page. Click “Save.”
• The Minify JavaScript files option will do more than Use Minified JavaScript to speed your website up, so select this at top of the page.
• If you have the Boost module enabled, clear its cache to regenerate the page with the Minify module.

That’s how you can minify your files and maximize your website’s speed and, consequently, the fruit it will give you. We also offer you a way to minify your effort in this process ;) Just contact the Drudesk team, and we will help you with installing and configuring the Minify module. However, it’s just one of the ways to speed up your site, so a performance audit by our experts will reveal all the other things your website needs to unfold its wings. Minimum fuss, maximum result!