Minify before deploying to production. Smaller stylesheets mean faster page loads, lower bandwidth costs, and better Lighthouse scores. A typical website stylesheet of 50 KB often minifies to 35–40 KB — saving hundreds of milliseconds on slow connections.
Format/Beautify when you've received minified CSS you need to read or edit — from a third-party library, a CMS output, or a legacy codebase. Formatted CSS is indented and line-broken so you can understand the selector hierarchy at a glance.
In modern web development, CSS minification is typically handled automatically by build tools like webpack, Vite, or PostCSS with the cssnano plugin. This tool is ideal for quick one-off optimizations or checking a specific snippet.