Remove Unused CSS and JavaScript Files with WP Asset CleanUp

Back in 2010, Google announced that they are using site speed in web search ranking.

Speeding up websites is important — not just to site owners, but to all Internet users. Faster sites create happy users and we’ve seen in our internal studies that when a site responds slowly, visitors spend less time there. But faster sites don’t just improve user experience; recent data shows that improving site speed also reduces operating costs. Like us, our users place a lot of value in speed — that’s why we’ve decided to take site speed into account in our search rankings.

Not only your website has chances in ranking higher, but you also make your visitors happier and you will end up having more conversions if you focus on making your pages load faster.

Often when you use themes and plugins that are loading a substantial number of CSS and JavaScripts files you end up having a slow page due to the total number of HTTP requests (some of the files like JS libraries can be quite large) and even JS errors due to conflicts between unoptimised JavaScript files loading in the same page.

For instance, you might use a plugin that generates contact forms and it loads its assets (.CSS and .JS files) in every page of your website instead of doing it only in the /contact page (if that’s the only place where you need it).

WP Asset CleanUp offers you a way to unload all the assets that are not needed in your pages. It will print out all the files that are enqueued in WordPress, and then you can decide which doesn’t belong in that page.

Some of the advantages of using this plugin are:

• Less HTTP requests loaded (important for faster load)
• Reduces the HTML code of the actual page (that’s even better if GZIP compression is enabled)
• Makes HTML code easier to scan and find things (even better if you’re a developer)
• Removes possible conflicts between plugins/theme (e.g. two .js files that are loading from different plugins and they interfere)
• Better performance score if you test your URL on websites such as GTmetrix, PageSpeed Insights, Pingdom Website Speed Test
• Google will love your website more as it would be faster and fast page load is nowadays a factor in search ranking
• Your server access log files (e.g the Apache ones) will be small, easier to go through and would take less space on your server

At the time of writing (11 December, 2016), with this plugin you can unload scripts and styles for posts, pages, custom post types and the homepage. Bulk unloading is also available. If you want, for instance, to unload a script that is loading on pages belonging to a specific post type (e.g. could be “product” from WooCommerce) or unload it everywhere, this is also possible.

WP Asset CleanUp detects only the styles and scripts that are enqueued into WordPress the right way (e.g. via wp_enqueue_script and wp_enqueue_style functions), not hardcoded (as this would be against the WordPress standards) as this is a bad practice anyway and most of the well known themes and plugins (if not all) should follow the rules and use the right functions to load their scripts.

Combined with a cache plugin that will exponentially improve the loading speed of WordPress pages, WP Asset CleanUp will make things even better for both the visitors and the developers.

Get WP Asset CleanUp plugin