Does minifying change how my CSS behaves?

No. Only whitespace and comments are removed, both of which are insignificant to the parser. Rules, order and specificity are untouched.

Is it worth minifying if I already use gzip?

Yes, though the marginal gain is smaller. Gzip compresses repetitive whitespace well, but minifying first still produces a smaller compressed file, and the two combine.

Should I keep the original file?

Always. Minified CSS is unmaintainable — keep your source in version control and minify as a build step, never by hand-editing the minified output.

Web & Developer

CSS Minifier

Strips comments, line breaks and unnecessary whitespace from CSS, leaving functionally identical but much smaller output. Typical savings are 20-40% before any gzip compression is applied on top.

Free, no signupRuns entirely in your browser

Input

Raw CSS

Result

.header{background-color:#ffffff;padding:20px;margin-bottom:15px}.header h1{color:#333333;font-size:24px}

About

What the CSS Minifier does

Since CSS blocks rendering — the browser will not paint until it has parsed your stylesheets — shrinking it has a direct effect on how quickly a page becomes visible. That makes it one of the cheapest performance wins available.

How it works

Using the CSS Minifier

1Paste your CSS.
2Comments are removed.
3Whitespace around braces, colons and semicolons is stripped.
4Line breaks are removed.
5Copy the minified stylesheet.

Use cases

What people use it for

Shrinking a stylesheet before deploying
Reducing render-blocking CSS weight
Preparing critical inline CSS for the head
Cutting the size of an emailed HTML template

FAQ

Frequently asked questions

6 related

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