: Joining and compressing all javascript files together - good idea? Curently, I avoid loading any unnecesary scripts on individual pages of my site. I have a class that remembers all javascript

@Annie201

Reducing http requests is one of the best ways to decrease your load time. Consequently it's best to serve one big JS file for your entire site. Give it a high expiry date and it will be cached for a long time, so a visitor will load this file only once.

Even though it might be a bit bigger you'll save a lot of load time by saving all the http requests. Just remember to change the URL of your big JS file whenever your javascript changes, e.g. by adding a ?unique_hash parameter.

The same reasoning goes for bundling all CSS into one big file.

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@Sue5673885

I am using this technique myself for groups of pages and I am very happy with it. I have also learned to wrap my Javascript in an IFEE and to have uglify.js minimize it. It is even better.

In some cases, because I can have many combinations of javascripts for many files, I create many IFEEs and minimize them separately. I can easily achieve this because I use node.js, but I am sure there must be solutions for PHP.

The benefit of grouping Javascript is that it reduces the amount of interaction with the server, especially when setting a proper expiration value. After shrinking it, you get an extra speed kick when displaying the page.

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