Improving site speed requires several things to be addressed that all combined help you deliver faster pages to your end-users. This can be a time-consuming process to keep running effectively and we all know fast page loading is non-negotiable in today’s web world.

When it comes to speed, Kinsta’s hosting platform has plenty of features that make it easy to have a really fast site. Today, we’re thrilled to announce an additional way Kinsta customers can use to make their pages even faster: minification through Kinsta CDN.

What Is Minification?

Code minification, sometimes referred to as “minimization”, is the process of removing unnecessary elements from JavaScript or CSS files. Think of white spaces, developer’s comments, line brakes, and similar.

These elements are part of the code, in the first place, because code is written and read by humans (web developers). But code is also read by machines (browsers), which don’t need, for example, indentation or comments to understand that script or stylesheet. They simply perform the actions required.

How Minification Improves Page Speed

Thanks to minification, you get rid of “unnecessary” elements for the browser to operate and end up with reduced-size files that bring you several benefits when it comes to speed:

  • Your JavaScript and CSS files are smaller.
  • Scripts in minimized files load faster.
  • Minimized CSS files are parsed faster.

All these combined improve your page loading speed. And you can do this now directly in MyKinsta!

Introducing Code Minification

If you like the idea of making your pages load faster but are wondering how difficult that would be, here’s the answer: as a Kinsta customer, you simply need to enable Kinsta CDN and tick a couple of checkboxes in MyKinsta.

That’s it, your files will now be minimized:

Specifically, thanks to the code modification feature we introduced, you’ll be able to optimize either your JavaScript files or CSS files only, or pick both, based on your preferences.

Top 3 Advantages of Minification Through Kinsta CDN

Kinsta customers can take full advantage of minification without the need of relying on web apps, PHP scripts, or plugins because the minification occurs on Cloudflare’s edge network, which powers Kinsta CDN, and is cached there as well. This translates into immediate benefits, such as:

  • Since Cloudflare handles code minification on their end, your server doesn’t need to use additional resources like more CPU, more memory, additional storage to minify your files.
  • Cloudflare minifies the files in the background, so the first request to a not-yet-minified asset is not delayed by Cloudflare’s process to make it minified. The next request to that asset should get the cached, minified version.
  • Cloudflare takes care of serving your minified files directly from the closest edge server to your visitors making the request, freeing your server from having to subsequently serve the minified files either.

What’s Next?

Code minification is the latest feature available to Kinsta customers that dramatically helps improve the speed of your pages (almost) effortlessly. It’s already available on all plans at no additional cost. For more detailed information, make sure to read our documentation.

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