Cloudflare to remove Auto Minify

Cloudflare recently announced an important change: thediscontinuation of the Auto Minify feature as of August 5, 2024. If your website uses this minify feature, here’s what you need to know and how it could impact your experience as a WordPress user.

What is minification?

Minification is the translation of the English expression “minify”.

Minification is the process of removing unnecessary or redundant data without affecting the way a resource is processed by the browser.

According to Mozilla

It’s worth noting that the code created for a web page is generally made up of several dozen lines of code containing comments and spaces to make it easier for web developers to read and understand. This additional information is totally useless to your browser. The transfer of this information therefore slows down the loading time of a web page.

To maximize loading time, minification removes all superfluous content before sending it to the browser.

Here is an example of CSS code produced by a developer to make it readable:

.ma-classe {
    display: none; /* on n'affiche pas */
    background-color: #000000;
}

The code above contains 87 characters.

If we apply a minification technique that removes all elements that are not essential for the browser to understand the code (removal of superfluous spaces, comments, carriage returns, etc.), we obtain the following:

.ma-classe{display:none;background-color:#000}

The code now contains 46 characters, i.e. 48% fewer characters. Imagine the amount of information you can avoid sending on a file containing hundreds or thousands of lines!

Understanding change

Auto Minify was a key Cloudflare feature, designed to optimize content delivery by reducing the size of HTML, CSS and JavaScript files.

However, as web development practices evolve, more and more sites are already minifying their files during site construction, making Auto Minify less relevant for many users.

Impact on WordPress users

For WordPress users, you could be impacted if you use this Cloudflare feature. The impact won’t be major in most cases, but every effort counts to improve your site’s speed!

If you religiously monitor the PageSpeed rating of your pages, it will certainly be affected by this change if this is the technique used to improve the delivery of your site’s static files.

Unless…

Alternatives?

Many WordPress extensions offer automatic minification features, but with Cloudflare removing this function, it’s time to review your performance optimization strategies.

If your WordPress site already uses a caching extension (such as WP Rocket), there’s a good chance that it’s equipped with a minification feature. If so, simply check to see if it’s enabled!

If your WordPress site isn’t optimized for speed, we recommend considering a Performance Audit to implement the right strategies for your situation.

Conclusion

Cloudflare’s move underscores the importance of website developers and owners staying up to date with the latest performance optimization practices. While the end ofAuto Minify may require some fine-tuning, it also opens the door to new opportunities to maintain and improve the user experience via the performance of your WordPress site.