Andrea's Blogger Templates

Comments can increase the size of your CSS files quite considerably. Therefore, you may want to strip comments from your live style sheets. Many HTML/CSS and text editors have a search-and-replace option, making it pretty easy to remove comments from your code. Alternatively, you could use one of several online CSS optimizers such as the one found at www.cssoptimiser.com Not only does an optimizer remove comments, but it also strips out whitespace, helping to shave off a few extra bytes from your code. If you do choose to strip comments from your live style sheets, remember to retain a commented version for your production environment. The best way of managing this process is to create a deployment script that strips comments automatically when you make your changes go live. However, as this is an advanced technique, it’s probably best left to fairly large, sophisticated sites.

Instead, the best way of reducing file size would be to enable server-side compression. If you are using an Apache server, talk to your hosts about installing mod_gzip or mod_deflate. All modern browsers can handle files compressed with GZIP, and decompress them on the fly. These Apache modules will detect whether your browser  can handle such files, and if it can, send a compressed version. Server-side compression can reduce your HTML and CSS files by around 80 percent, reducing your bandwidth and making your pages much faster to download. If you don’t have access to these Apache modules, you still may be able to compress your files by following the tutorial found at http://tinyurl.com/8w9rp.