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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-05-17T22:22:24+00:00

Minimizing html is the only section on Google’s Page Speed where there is still

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Minimizing html is the only section on Google’s Page Speed where there is still room for improvement.

My site is all dynamic and the HTML is already Deflated so there is no reason to put any more pressure on the server (I don’t want to minimize pages real time before sending).

What I could do was to minimize the template files. My templates files are a mix of PHP and HTML so I’ve come up with some code that I think is pretty safe but would like to be community revised.

// this will loop trough all template files
// php is cleaned first so that line-comments will not interfere with the regex
$original = file_get_contents($dir.'/'.$file);
$php_clean = php_strip_whitespace($dir.'/'.$file);
$minimized = preg_replace('/\s+/', ' ', $php_clean);

This will make my template files as a single very long file alternated with some places where DB content is inserted. Google’s homepage source looks more or less like what I get so I wonder if they follow a similar approach.

Question 1: Do you antecipate potencial problems?
Question 2: Is there anyway better (more efficient to do this)?

And please remember that I’m not trying to validate HTML as the templates are not valid HTML (header and footer are includes, for example).

Edit: Do take into consideration that the template files will be minimized on deploy. As CSS and Javascript files are minimized and compressed using YUI Compressure and Closure, the template files would be minimized like-wise, on deploy. Not on client-request.

Thank you.

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    I’ve been running tests on all my sites for a couple of weeks and I can say that this method is pretty consistent. It will only affect template content, so there is little risk of messing up with unknown <pre> or similar.

    It is run before deploy so there is no impact on server – actually there should be a little speed up as the file becomes smaller.

    Do remember that all content that comes from the database will not suffer any influence as, like said before, this runs before deploy and on template files only.

    The method seams solid enough to pass it into production.

    If anything goes wrong I’ll post it here.

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