When someone says "minify your HTML," they usually mean "remove whitespace and comments." But HTML minification has more nuance than that — there are different levels, real trade-offs, and situations where it provides almost no benefit. Here's what you actually need to know. What HTML minification does At its core, minification removes characters that are required for human readability but not for browser rendering: Whitespace : extra spaces, tabs, line breaks between tags Comments : <!-- HTML comments like this --> Optional closing tags : </li> , </td> , and others that the HTML spec allows omitting Redundant quotes : <div class=container> is valid; <div class="container"> has the same effect Redundant attributes : <input type="text"> — type="text" is already the default Inline CSS/JS minification : minify any <style> and <script> blocks embedded in the HTML A typical HTML document can be reduced by 10–30% with aggressive minification.…