Optimizing HTML hurts page speed?

Hi Ethan;
optimizing html should not make your site slower, although it won’t make it much faster either.

the problem with gtmetrix is that it does only one run, which means that you might see exceptions rather then the big picture. It would be better to run those tests on webpagetest.org and under “advanced settings” set “number of tests to run” to 5 (or more). the result will then show you the stats for the median result, which means you’re less likely to see one-off results.

i’ll be happy to compare your webpagetest.org test results.

frank

Hi Frank,

I’ll do some more extensive testing on WebPageTest, thank you.

I’ve used Autoptimize on numerous websites for my clients and I notice that the output varies depending on the theme I am using.

On my own website (link), when I minify my HTML, I still see a lot of white-spacing and new lines in my page source. May you help me clarify on why my results are like that?

is optimize HTML currently active Ethan?

Yes it is, I also cleared my website’s cache.

well, then HTML optimization clearly isn’t working at all. no idea why though, I suspect this might be a plugin conflict of some kind, maybe try disabling plugins one by one (and possibly switching theme briefly) to identify the culprit? or maybe the php errorlog has useful info?

Found the plugin conflict: Ultimate Addons for Visual Composer (link)

Ultimate Addons has a setting in the plugin to optimize CSS and JS as well. For me, these options were turned on. This was fixed when I turn off the options in plugin and now my HTML is minified by Autoptimized instead.

Resolved.

Ultimate Addons has a setting in the plugin to optimize CSS and JS as well.

didn’t know that, thanks for the feedback!