Combine, Minify, And Compress Your JavaScript

It pretty much goes without saying that if you are building a public facing website these days you are probably using a ridiculous amount of JavaScript. And it is also likely that most of the JavaScript is in the form of libraries that you didn't write and you don't maintain. But even if you aren't maintaining those libraries, you are still responsible for pushing them all down to your users. And so you can get into the situation where you have either hundreds of kilobytes of JavaScript or you just end up with a ton of tiny script files. Both of these can really put a damper on the amount of time that your site initially loads for your user.

Fortunately for us there are several solutions to the problem of slow loading JavaScript. One is to try and load most of your libraries from content delivery networks (CDN) provided by companies like Google and Microsoft. A second is to employ a CDN of your own like Amazon's CloudFront. But no matter what you are doing to speed up your the delivery of your JavaScript, it is absolutely imperative that you do three things:

  1. Combine your JavaScript files: Concatenate all of your JavaScript files into a single file so that the browser only has to make one request to download your scripts.
  2. Minify your JavaScript files: Perform some optimizations on your JavaScript to remove whitespace, shorten variable names, and in some instances even perform some static analysis to optimize statements or  remove unused code.
  3. Compress your JavaScript: Enabled gzip compression so that users that have browsers which support compression will receive a smaller file.

Read more: CodeThinked Part 1, Part 2

Posted via email from jasper22's posterous