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This Hint has been deprecated, and we no longer consider it best practice. In order to get the most accurate audit results from Sitebulb, please ensure you update to the latest version.

Low This Hint is of the lowest significance, and should only be addressed if there are not more serious issues which have not been handled. Issue This Hint represents an error or problem that needs to be fixed.

HTML content is not minified

This means that the URL in question contains HTML which is not minified or could be minified further.

Why is this important?

When building HTML pages and templates, developers tend to use spacing, comments and well-named variables to make code and markup readable for themselves. It also helps others who might later work on the assets. While this is a plus during development, it becomes a negative when it comes to serving your pages. Web servers and browsers can parse file content without comments and well-structured code, both of which create additional network traffic without providing any functional benefit.

These unnecessary characters usually include white space characters, new line characters, comments, and sometimes block delimiters, which are used to add readability to the code but are not required for it to execute.

Minification works by analyzing and rewriting the text-based parts of a file to reduce its overall size, resulting in faster response times and lower bandwidth costs.

What does the Hint check?

This Hint will trigger for any internal URL which contains HTML that could be minified further.

Examples that trigger this Hint:

The Hint would trigger for any URL which contains HTML with comments, characters or spacing that are functionally redundant:

<!DOCTYPE html>
<html>
<head>
<meta charset="utf-8">
<title>Not a perfect website</title>
</head>
<body>
<h1>This is my site</h1>
<p>And I live in it. It's made of bugs and unminified HTML.
It's changed a lot since it was new, it's done stuff it wasn't built to do,
I often try to fill it up with swear words.
But here's the really weird thing, I spend so much hating it,
it never says a bad word about me.</p>
</body>
</html>

How do you resolve this issue?

To solve this issue, you would need to use a HTML minifier to minify your HTML, which will automatically strip out the redundant elements. There are lots of online service for manually minifying your files - you paste your HTML into the service's UI, and it returns a minified version of the code (e.g. Minify Code).

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