How To Fix Your UNMINIFIED JAVASCRIPT and CSS Issues in SIte Audits

More digital marketing pros than you want to admit have undoubtedly told you about the advantages of having a fast-loading website. When you take the effort to address issues with Unminified JavaScript and CSS files, one of the most efficient ways to speed up your site across each page occurs.

If you are a regular user of site auditing tools featured in SEO platforms such as SEMrush, Ahrefs, or Moz, you have most likely encountered the following warning in your list of warnings to fix: issues with unminimized Javascript and CSS.

What exactly is “Unminified JAVASCRIPT and CSS”? What is the process? What does “miniaturize JAVASCRIPT and CSS” mean?

Before we go into what unminified JavaScript and CSS are, let’s make sure we’re all on the same page on what JavaScript and CSS do on your website.

• JavaScript is, at its heart, a programming language. Its main goal is to create dynamic and interactive elements on webpages and then inform your browser where to find those dynamic/interactive elements and what to do with them.
• CSS stands for Cascading Style Sheet. This file assists your web developers in creating a consistent look and feel for your site without having to copy and paste the same material on each individual page.

What are Unminified JAVASCRIPT and CSS files?

Simply put, they are scripts and files in their advanced state.

Web developers must adhere to a set of coding language principles in order to construct web pages and sites, but practically all of them have their own distinctive technique of creating something from nothing. Companies’ developers frequently alter over time. Then, fresh developers bring their own way to changing JavaScript and CSS in order to do new tasks or redesign website layouts.

As these files expand over time, they might become clogged with items such as:

• Lines that aren’t absolutely necessary
• There is no such thing as white space.
• Source code annotations
• External server hosting is available.

As a result, you’re left with unminified JavaScript and CSS files running key site operations. Consider unminified files to be the Arnold Schwarzenegger character from Twins hanging out on your server.

How to fix Unminified Javascript and CSS on your website

You can fix unminified JavaScript and CSS files in a variety of ways. The path to minified JavaScript and CSS is determined by the platform on which your website was created. The three options for completing the fix are explained below.

• How to Fix in a WordPress Site
• How to Fix in Content Management Systems Other Than WordPress (CMS)
• How to Fix Old School Computers That Don’t Have CMS

How to Fix Unminified JAVASCRIPT and CSS in WordPress

“There’s a plugin for that,” is our go-to response to any WordPress-related difficulty.

Completing minification enhancements to your JavaScript and CSS in WordPress leads in the same two-step solution…

1. To address these issues, install a plugin.

2. Install, activate, and configure your preferred file-mining plugin.

Click the Minify ON button in CSS settings, JS settings, and HTML settings, as follows:

Then click Save Changes. It fixed. Please re-run auditing your site.

How to minify JAVASCRIPT and CSS using apps from other popular CMS solutions?

WordPress is the content management system used by over half of the top 1 million websites on the internet, according to BuiltWith trend monitoring. If you don’t use WordPress for personal reasons but still use a popular CMS with comparable third-party applications, take a look at any of the links below. You could be on your way to discovering your next favourite Drupal module or Joomla or Magento plugin.

• Drupal: AdvAgg
• Joomla!: JCH Optimize
• Magento: Aptrian

Please keep in mind that we are not necessarily supporting the tools listed above; we are only listing them as the most prevalent CMS tools at the time of writing.

Have you tried any of the apps listed above? How did they go for you? Please let us know in the comments section so that we can share your experience with other readers!

How to minify JAVASCRIPT and CSS the old School way?

Don’t run your website on WordPress or any of the other platforms listed below? Then you may have some additional work to do to complete the minification of your JavaScript and CSS.

At the same time, you might not be able to accomplish anything.

If you use Kentico as your web content management system, for example, you can configure minification for these files directly in the administration section.

It’s okay, I was astounded to learn this as well. However, read the documentation.

There may be nothing you can do if your website was designed with Squarespace or Wix.

• Squarespace claims that their platform includes minification.
• Wix, on the other hand, does not appear to give its consumers the option to change this OR include it as a standard solution.

The most efficient old school technique to fixing minification issues with JavaScript and CSS is to use these two tools from Uglify – UglifyJS.net and UglifyCSS.com – instead of manually combing through your code line by line to remove excess lines, white space, and comments. Using these two open-source tools can let you get rid of all the extraneous junk without jeopardising your main functionality.

Again, we are not advocating the Uglify suite of tools; we are only offering this as the most prevalent “old school” approach at the time of writing. Feel free to continue, but proceed with caution.

And, if you’ve used the Uglify applications successfully, let us know in a chat how they went so we can share your experience with others.

The Bottom Line

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