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Make Hexo blog smaller 2018-09-28 00:00:00

Static site serves html, css, javascript and images. These files can be compressed to reduce bandwidth.

Minify

Minify html, css and js to remove characters that are not required for the code to function. This process involves removing white space/tab, line break and comments. I read somewhere that Google saves gigabytes of bandwidth just by removing line break, which surprised me how much line break alone costs when you have the popularity of Google.com. In Hexo, there are two approaches.

hexo-all-minifier

  1. The easiest way is using hexo-all-minifier. Unlike others, this plugin also compress images as well. To use it, simply add the following line to package.json: 
    	"hexo-all-minifier": "^0.5.2"
  2. Note you should add a comma at the end of previous line, but no comma at the last value. The last few lines look like this: 
    	...
	"hexo-renderer-stylus": "latest",
	"hexo-server": "latest",
	"hexo-all-minifier": "^0.5.2"
  }
}
  3. Run $ npm install to install it.
  4. To enable it, put all_minifier: true line at _config.yml.
  5. Deploy.

To see this in action, check out this job log. As you can see, the resulting files are around 20% smaller. However, do note that its image compression dependencies have some vulnerabilities. This can be patched using Snyk.

hexo-yam

Despite the convenience of hexo-all-minifier, I don't use it due to the vulnerabity. I don't need its image compression as I plan to use Cloudinary via hexo-cloudinary plugin.

Thus, I switch to hexo-yam which doesn't offer image compression. To use, add the following line to package.json:

    "hexo-yam": "latest"
  1. $ npm install and enable the plugin by putting neat_enable: true to _config.yml.
  2. Deploy.

Compression

Compression uses more advanced technique to reduce the file size even further. Most modern web browsers support gzip decompression and prefer it (with appropriate HTTP header). As you might know from zipping a text file, this can yield significant reduction in file size. For example, my home page index.html is less than half smaller (3.3KB > 1.2KB). Check it out here.

Update: hexo-yam v0.5.0 onwards offer gzip and brotli compressions. After you install it, it will automatically compress assets files to .gz and .br whenever hexo generate/deploy/server. This means the command $ find .... as shown below is no longer required.

  1. Linux distro has built-in gzip. Install brotli through apt/dnf/yum/pacman.
  2. To compress, simply run the following commands after you generate static files ($ hexo generate), 
    $ find public -type f -iregex '.*\.\(htm\|html\|txt\|text\|js\|css\)$' -execdir gzip -f --keep {} \;
$ find public -type f -iregex '.*\.\(htm\|html\|txt\|text\|js\|css\)$' -execdir brotli -f --keep {} \;
  3. If you use CI like .gitlab-ci.yml or .travis.yml, simply add the above command under script:, next line after hexo deploy.
  4. Deploy.