Minify HTML SEO

Amazon’s desktop version of the site if minified the HTML would be 8% smaller, that’s 4.2KiB a visitor has to download they shouldn’t have to. That might not sound a lot (it isn’t a lot), but Amazon hasn’t minified HTML, CSS or Javascript and it totals about 6 Kib on the homepage.

It doesn’t sound a lot (and it isn’t), but it’s a Google SEO metric because it has an impact on the user experience.

Amazon has a huge amount of traffic, if they can reduce their HTML size by 4% not only will it save Amazon money on bandwidth (will be cheaper to run their site), but Amazon will run faster for it’s users and research has shown every second extra it takes for a webpage to load costs the business money: visitors are distracted easily and leave. Every millisecond counts, they could be loosing millions of dollars in revenue a year because they haven’t bothered minifying.

This is an SEO no-brainer, minifying doesn’t hurt the user experience, it makes files smaller meaning they load faster. All websites should minify as much HTML, CSS and Javascript as possible. Same is true for images, Amazon doesn’t optimize it’s images particularly well, the potential saving from image optimization dwarfs the minify issue above.

This is a tiny SEO issue for most websites, but then most sites aren’t generating billions of visits a year, 1% loss in revenue for a company with $75 billion plus revenue because some users leave because it’s not loading fast is HUGE.

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