Can Webflow minify HTML, CSS and JS on exported sites?

When publishing a Webflow site to Webflow servers, it is possible, under the dropdown for “Advanced Options,” to select checkboxes to “minify” HTML, CSS and JS so that the site loads faster.

Is there a way to minify HTML, CSS and JS when exporting code from Webflow to upload to a third-party host? Or are those options something that you sacrifice when exporting code from Webflow?

From what I can see, you’re only able to minify the HTML code (not the CSS or JS) but you’ll need to hit CTRL+O on the export dialog to bring up the checkbox for it:

That said, I don’t see why you couldn’t use a minifier tool and run the CSS and JS files through it if needed—although it seems strange that these aren’t offered by default :man_shrugging: You can probably get a more direct answer if you reach out to Webflow directly, but the “manual” way should work.

Thank you, @mikeyevin,

Very interesting, that hidden feature. Thanks for sharing it, I never would have found it.

Since posting this question, I found out that Siteground, the host I’m exporting to, includes Cloudflare CDN as part of its hosting features, and that you can turn on these minifications in Cloudflare’s settings.

In either case, the animation on my new site’s opening screen sometimes loads very slowly, whether on Webflow’s (http://miamijazzbands.webflow.io) or Siteground’s (https://www.miamijazzbands.com) servers. I’m not sure why that is, but it’s so slow sometimes that I’m considering removing them, which would be a shame.

Hmm, that’s odd, you’re using SVGs so I imagine that file size is relatively small for all of that content. I only tested it a couple times (admittedly I’m on fairly quick ~400mbps internet) but it loads fine for me.

Do you notice a pattern when the loading seems to be slower or is it somewhat random?

It mostly loaded fine until a couple days ago. I tried it today, it loaded slowly but acceptably on Chrome, but very chunky and jerky motion in the animations on Safari and Firefox. The text rotator below the logo sometimes takes a moment to appear, and is jerky for the first couple words. I’ve cleared my caches, not sure what’s going on. My Internet is 240mps.

@Chuck_Braman Both webflow and siteground url load with same speed and there is no any difference in performance.

The transition coming from down to up creating an impression it is stuck and loading slow, is it happening because of the transition setting ?

~ Vignesh

Thank you @Vignesh_Stack,

I don’t know, because I don’t know how different transition settings might affect the load speed. Do you have any insights as to any parameters I might change to improve the performance?

@Chuck_Braman I was referring to transition speed setting like delay 5 sec.

This setting doesn’t have anything to do with website performance, this is to check the UX.

@Vignesh_Stack,

Ah, I see, no, the timings are intentional. My concern is the page load speed. Google gives it a rating of 5 out of 100. I’m going to probably make a separate post for this, as it’s a separate issue. Odd that, in contrast to the uploaded site, toggling preview in Webflow everything loads smoothly and instantly (apart from intentional settings).

Google gives it a rating of 5 out of 100. I’m going to probably make a separate post for this, as it’s a separate issue. Odd that, in contrast to the uploaded site, toggling preview in Webflow everything loads smoothly and instantly (apart from intentional settings).

It looks like the lower score issue comes from the video usage on the page (multiple videos that all appear to be loading their own script files) so this is definitely where your biggest savings are going to come from.

There are some tutorials on preventing these videos from being fully “loaded” until the user interacts with them (only showing a preview image and a play button at first) and since you’re not auto-playing any of them by default this would be my recommendation. I’ve done it before on YouTube video players before, but I’d imagine the process for Vimeo is similar or even the same, so it should be fairly easy to do with a small snippet of custom code.

Since Webflow is not loading scripts in the Designer, your Preview isn’t really showing the true weight of the page in question, so publishing to the staging site is always encouraged before any sort of testing.

Thank you, @mikeyevin,

Google attributes 12 seconds of page load time to “unused Javascript.” That doesn’t sound very efficient!

I spent about 40 minutes trying to Google one of the tutorials you suggested, but wasn’t able to turn any up. Could you perhaps suggest a good search string, and/or maybe an appropriate forum I might post to? I apologize for being so technically inept.

I also sent a request to Vimeo’s tech support for advice on how to find such code or any other way to resolve the issue.

@mikeyevin,

Vimeo support just wrote back with the suggestion below. Can you tell from this if they are providing the solution to the problem, or just guessing? Do you think I should go through the trouble of replacing all this code, or continue to try to locate the custom code you suggested?