Minify CSS To Improve Site SEO
You can minify CSS to improve your site's search engine optimization efforts. I've previously talked about minifying and compressing images to also help each page's SEO. This is the last post about minification, I mean it!
First, what is CSS? It stands for Cascading Style Sheets, and the simple answer is it's programming language used to create web pages and user interfaces for both web and mobile applications. Think of it this way: everytime you create a new page or blog post on your site, it's the template and the functionality built within your website template that gets repeated for every page and post on your domain.
What does minification mean? Again, the simple answer is this: removing un-necessary code - from a web crawler's point of view - to make sites load faster and all web page code easier to read. This means removing developer comments, spaces and lines that aren't necessary for the code to load a page. That's a very, very simple short answer because I'm trying to keep this as non-technical as possible.
Do You Need To Minify CSS On Your Site?
Where can you find out if your site's CSS minification is necessary? There are a couple ways you can find this on your own. First, if you've verified your website through Google Search Console, you can easily see it there by following this path:
Other Resources - PageSpeed Insights
As soon as you click the link above, Search Console will automatically run your home page and give you a handy report like this one:
Click on the "Show how to fix" and you'll see this:
If you haven't figured this out yet, minifying the CSS is most likely a task for your friendly neighborhood web developer! You can run this test for any pages that are part of the verified domain in Search Console.
What if you don't have Google Search Console set up? Never fear, there's a great website where you can easily and quickly check it for no cost - Pingdom!
Start here:
When you run this, you'll get a butt load of test results, but this post is about CSS minification, so we'll stick to that. They'll give you the specific URLs, file paths, etc.
So now that you know how to do this check, do it and analyze the results. Everyplace you can minify and compress, do so. Make a laundry list for your web developer and have her knock these out. You'll be glad you did, and so will the search engine crawlers, since you're making it easier and faster for them to crawl your pages!
If you're interested in learning SEO, take an SEO training course with Invenio! Start with our Basics of SEO course - you'll be glad you did! It's also available as an online course.
Until we meet again, stay safely between the ditches!
All the best to you,
Nancy McDonald
