Asset CleanUp Pro works together with caching plugins. First, you eliminate the bloat by preventing useless CSS/JS from loading on your pages. Then, a caching plugin such as WP Rocket will take the remaining loaded files, minify/combine them and also cache the pages (by generating static HTML files which are accessed very quickly)
Upgrading to the premium plugin allows you to unload unused styles & scripts on extra pages such as:
- Taxonomy pages such as default WordPress’ categories, tags and custom created ones such as products’ categories from WooCommerce.
- Author pages (e.g. the page showing all posts published by a specific author, detected via is_author() function)
- Default WordPress Search Page
- WooCommmerce Search Page (which has the same settings as the actual shop page detected via is_shop() function)
- 404 Page (Not Found): this one has be as light as possible and it’s less likely that many of the CSS and JavaScript files that are needed here (detected via is_404() function)
- Date Archive Page: this is any page that retrieves articles filtered by the date, detected via is_date() function
There are a plethora of techniques that are often used to defer parsing; however, the simple and preferred technique is to simply Defer loading of JavaScript until it is needed. If this technique isn’t appropriate to use on your page, it is next suggested that you use the <script async> attribute where appropriate, which prevents parsing from blocking the initial page load by deferring it until the browser’s UI thread is not busy doing something else. All these settings can be applied with Asset CleanUp Pro without writing any code.
Change the location of the CSS/JS files (could be moved from HEAD to BODY to prevent render-blocking or vice-versa if you need early triggering of specific files)
Unload CSS/JS that is hardcoded (not loaded via the standard WordPress functions such as wp_enqueue_scripts()). The LINK/STYLE/SCRIPT tags could have been added via editing the PHP code (not using the right WordPress action hooks), directly inside posts content, widgets or via plugins such as “Insert Headers and Footers”, “Head, Footer and Post Injections”, etc.
“Test Mode” Functionality → Worried about making optimization mistakes? Don’t be anymore!
This allows you to optimize the website (unload useless files, set async, defer to loaded JavaScript files, clean up HTML code) without applying the changes “live” (to the regular visitor) in case you ever have any doubts that a change could break the functionality of the page/website. Any changes you’ve done will only be applied to you (the logged-in administrator). Once you’re happy with how the page looks and works, you can disable “Test Mode” to push the changes live so everyone else can enjoy the faster page loads