I am trying to optimize a site performance by consolidating and compressing the CSS and JS files. My question is more about the (concrete) steps on how to achieve this, given a real situation I was facing (should be typical among other developers too, though).
My page references several CSS and JS files like the following:
<!--
It's easier to work on smaller files during development.
Hence, the multiple CSS and JS files.
-->
<link type="text/css" rel="stylesheet" href="/css/main.css" />
<link type="text/css" rel="stylesheet" href="/css/secondary-1.css" />
<link type="text/css" rel="stylesheet" href="/css/secondary-2.css" />
<script type="text/javascript" src="/scripts/js/main.js"></script>
<script type="text/javascript" src="/scripts/js/adapter/adapter.js"></script>
<script type="text/javascript" src="/scripts/js/adapter/title-adapter.js"></script>
For the production release, I'd like to combine the 3 CSS files into one and minify it using e.g. YUI Compressor. But then, I'd need to update all pages that needs these 3 files to reference to the newly-minified CSS. This seems error-prone (e.g. you're removing and adding some lines in many files). Any other less-risky approach? The same issue for the JS files.
I ended up using CodeKit to concatenate my CSS and JS files. The feature that I find really useful is the ability to do the concatenation upon file save; because it monitors the respective CSS / JS assets. Once I got them properly combined e.g. to 1 CSS and 1 JS files, all other files simply can refer to these 2.
You can even ask CodeKit to do on-the-fly minification / compression.
Disclaimer: I am not affiliated in any way with CodeKit. I randomly found it on the web and it has served as a great tool in my development process. It also comes with good updates since I first used it more than a year ago.