CSS minification compresses stylesheets by removing unnecessary characters without changing functionality. Whitespace (spaces, tabs, line breaks), comments, and redundant semicolons are stripped, reducing file size. For example, a formatted CSS file with 10KB may shrink to 7KB after minification.
The minification process preserves CSS semantics while optimizing size. Rules, selectors, properties, and values remain intact, ensuring that minified CSS renders identically to the original. Only human-readable formatting is removed, creating compact code that browsers parse efficiently.
Smaller CSS files improve website performance. Reduced file sizes mean faster downloads over networks, especially on mobile or slow connections. Minified CSS decreases page load times, improves Core Web Vitals scores, and enhances user experience.
Minification is standard in production workflows. Build tools like Webpack, Vite, and Gulp automatically minify CSS during deployment. This tool provides quick, standalone minification for testing, debugging, or manual optimization without full build processes.
