Every byte counts when you are serving HTML to millions of requests. HTML minification is one of the cheapest performance wins in front-end development — but developers are often unsure what it actually does to their code and whether it is safe to apply in production. This article explains what a minifier removes, what it keeps, and the few edge cases where you need to be careful. What Minification Removes A minifier strips content that browsers ignore during parsing. Here is what typically gets removed: Whitespace between tags. Browsers collapse consecutive whitespace into a single space in most contexts. The newlines and indentation between your tags serve human readers, not the parser. <!-- Before --> <div> <p> Hello </p> </div> <!-- After --> <div><p> Hello </p></div> Enter fullscreen mode Exit fullscreen mode HTML comments. <!-- This is a comment --> is parsed and discarded by the browser. There is no runtime value.…