Compacting JavaScript code can save many bytes of data and speed up downloading, parsing, and execution time.
"Minifying" code refers to eliminating unnecessary bytes, such as extra spaces, line breaks, and indentation. Keeping JavaScript code compact has a number of benefits. First, for inline JavaScript and external files that you don't want cached, the smaller file size reduces the network latency incurred each time the page is downloaded. Secondly, minification can further enhance compression of external JS files and of HTML files in which the JS code is inlined. Thirdly, smaller files can be loaded and run more quickly by web browsers.
Several tools are freely available to minify JavaScript, including the Closure Compiler, JSMin or the YUI Compressor. You can create a build process that uses these tools to minify and rename the development files and save them to a production directory. We recommend minifying any JS files that are 4096 bytes or larger in size. You should see a benefit for any file that can be reduced by 25 bytes or more (less than this will not result in any appreciable performance gain).