We can confirm that minifying HTML using a 3rd party modification plugin won’t affect anything negatively in terms of SEO. In fact, it’s a best practice and it will improve the loading time of your site.
But this will make the code messy after compressed, won’t this make it difficult for Google to index my site?
No, not at all. Search engines won’t have any issues crawling the site.
Then, if I use other optimizations, like minify JS, CSS, etc.
Will I have problems like I mentioned earlier?
Not at all, you can use any types of modifications on your website.
Even if it changes the code and gets rid of some unnecessary code?
@mushlih Minification doesn’t remove code, it removes elements that are nonessential to a machine reading it (unnecessary spaces, comments, etc).
I mean this setting, is it causing problems with SEO?
@mushlih Thanks for your reply. We reviewed the image, but there are four settings shown here. Which specifically did you mean?
The only setting we see here that might result in the content being perceptively changed is the removal of the <noscript> tag. However, all this tag does is remove a tag that shows alternate content if the user should have JavaScript disabled in their browser.
Disabling JavaScript in a browser is not typical, and furthermore, it would drastically impact a user’s experience with or without the <noscript> tag. In addition, this would in no way impact the SEO ranking, or a search engine’s ability to parse and crawl the content of your page. You can read more about the <noscript> tag here: https://www.w3schools.com/tags/tag_noscript.asp
So in essence, can all the settings in that image cause SEO problems?
In our understanding, all those settings on the screenshot should not cause SEO problems on your site as all those options are purely for site speed optimization purposes. They don’t affect your site ranking and indexing.
Then, why did my site traffic decrease after I optimized the LiteSpeed plugin?
Hi,
We are not sure why there was an issue with lower traffic when you activated the LiteSpeed plugin. We can only say to contact LiteSpeed plugin authors for more information as there may be a setting or a configuration which needs to be set-up.
In addition, there was a Google Algorithm update in Dec 2020, so traffic loss may be the result of that update. This guide explains more: https://moz.com/blog/googles-december-2020-core-update.
