Don't just minify & combine CSS/JavaScript files ending up with large, bloated and slow loading pages:
Strip the "fat" first and get a faster website :)
Faster page load = Happier Visitors = More Conversions = More Revenue
There are often times when you are using a theme and a number of plugins which are enabled and run on the same page. However, you don't need to use all of them and to improve the speed of your website and make the HTML source code cleaner (convenient for debugging purposes), it's better to prevent those styles and scripts from loading.
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).
"Asset CleanUp" scans your page and detects all the assets that are loaded. All you have to do when editing a page/post is just to select the CSS/JS that are not necessary to load, this way reducing the bloat.
The plugin works best in combination with a cache plugin (e.g. WP Rocket, WP Fastest Cache, W3 Total Cache), a hosting company that offers packages with server-level caching available (e.g. WP Engine, Kinsta) or a service like Cloudflare that has page caching enabled.
Main plugin's benefits include
- Decreases the number of HTTP requests loaded and eliminate render-blocking resources (important for faster page load) by unloading useless CSS/JS
- Preload CSS/JS, Local Fonts & Google Fonts files to instruct the browser to download the chosen assets as soon as possible
- Minify CSS files (including inline code within STYLE tags)
- Minify JavaScript files (including inline code within SCRIPT tags)
- Combine remaining loaded CSS & JavaScript files
- Inline CSS Files (automatically & by specifying the path to the stylesheets)
- Defer combined JavaScript files by applying "defer" attribute to the SCRIPT tags
- Site-wide removal for Emojis, Dashicons for guest users and Comment Reply if they are not used
- Disable RSS Feeds
- Reduces the HTML code of the actual page (that's even better if GZIP compression is enabled)
- Makes source code easier to scan in case you're a developer and want to search for something
- Remove possible conflicts between plugins/theme (e.g. 2 JavaScript files that are loading from different plugins and they interfere one with another)
- 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 easier to scan and would take less space on your server
Google Fonts Optimization / Removal
- Combine all Google Font requests into fewer (usually one) requests, saving one round trip to the server for each additional font requested
- Choose between three methods of delivery: Render-blocking, Asynchronous via Web Font Loader (webfont.js) or Asynchronous by preloading the CSS stylesheet
- Option to preload Google Font Files from fonts.gstatic.com (e.g. ending in .woff2)
- Apply "font-display" CSS property to all loaded Google Font requests
- Enable preconnect resource hint for fonts.gstatic.com in case you use Google Fonts; don't let the browser wait until it fetches the CSS for loading the font files before it begins DNS/TCP/TLS
- Remove all Google Font requests including link/font preloads, @import/@font-face from CSS files & STYLE tags, resource hints
Local Fonts Optimization
- Preload local font files (ending in .woff, .woff2, .ttf, etc.)
- Apply "font-display:" CSS property to @font-face from existing to LINK / STYLE tags to improve the PageSpeed score for "Ensure text remains visible during webfont load"
Critical CSS
- You can add already generated critical CSS (e.g. via tools such as Advanced Critical CSS Generator customly for the homepage, posts, pages, taxonomy pages (e.g. category), archive pages (e.g. date, author), search, 404 not found
- The critical CSS can be added within the Dashboard as well as via code / Read More
Remove useless links, meta tags and HTML comments within the HEAD and BODY (footer) tags of the website
- Really Simple Discovery (RSD) link tag
- REST API link tag
- Pages/Posts Shortlink tag
- WordPress version meta tag (also good for security reasons)
- All "generator" meta tags (also good for security reasons)
- RSS Feed Link Tags (usually they are not needed if your website is not used for blogging purposes)
- oEmbeds, if you do not need to embed videos (e.g. YouTube), tweets and audios
- Valid HTML Comments (exceptions from stripping can be added and Internet Explorer conditional comments are preserved)
Each option can be turned on/off depending on your needs. Instructions about each of them are given in the plugin's settings page.
Disable partially or completely XML-RPC protocol
This is an API service used by WordPress for 3rd party applications, such as mobile apps, communication between blogs and plugins such as Jetpack. If you use or are planning to use a remote system to post content to your website, you can keep this feature enabled (which it is by default). Many users do not use this function at all and if you’re one of them, you can disable it.
Plugin works with WordPress Multisite Network enabled!
Asset CleanUp Pro
This plugin is the lite version of Asset CleanUp Pro that comes with more benefits including managing assets (CSS & JS files) on all WordPress pages, unloading plugins site-wide or via Regex(es), apply "async" and "defer" attributes on loaded JavaScript files which would boost the speed score even higher, move the loading location of CSS/JS files (from HEAD to BODY to reduce render-blocking or vice-versa if you need specific files to trigger earlier) and premium support. Click here to purchase Asset CleanUp Pro!
NOTES
People that have tested the plugin are so far happy with it and I want to keep a good reputation for it. In case something is not working for you or have any suggestions, please write to me on the forum and I will be happy to assist you.
BEFORE rating this plugin, please check the following post
http://chrislema.com/theres-wrong-way-give-plugin-feedback-wordpress-org/ and then use your common sense when writing the feedback :)
GO PRO
- Unload CSS/JS files on all WordPress pages including Categories, Tags, Custom Taxonomy (e.g. WooCommerce product category), 404 Not Found, Date & Author Archives, Search Results)
- Unload plugins in the frontend view (for guest visitors) * This will not just unload the CSS/JS files loaded from the plugins, but everything else related to them (e.g. slow database queries)
- Unload plugins within the Dashboard /wp-admin/ * Do you have any slow pages that are loading within the Dashboard? You can reduce seconds in page load for some bulky ones or fix plugin conflicts
- Instruct the browser to download a CSS/JS file based on the visitor's screen size (e.g. avoid downloading assets in mobile view when they are not needed, if the screen size is smaller than 768px)
- Defer CSS by appending it to the BODY to load it asynchronously (Render blocking CSS delays a web page from being visible in a timely manner)
- Move JavaScript files from HEAD to BODY and vice-versa (CSS files moved to the BODY are automatically deferred)
- Defer JavaScript loaded files (by applying "defer" attribute to any enqueued JS file)
- Async JavaScript loaded files (by applying "async" attribute to any enqueued JS file)
- Inline JavaScript files (automatically & by specifying the path to the stylesheets)
- Priority in releasing new features & other improvements (updates that are meant for both Lite and Pro plugins are first released to the Pro users)
- Premium support and updates within the Dashboard
Give Asset CleanUp a try! If you want to unlock all features, you can Upgrade to the Pro version.
1.3.9.7
- CSS assets can now be preloaded (via the CSS/JS manager) in an async way as well * Read more
- Reduce the total number of SQL queries used to obtain information
- Stop triggering PHP code and SQL queries on pages where they are not relevant
- Cache SQL queries that are time consuming, which is ideal for websites with a very large database (e.g. tens / hundred of thousands of users)
1.3.9.6
- Fix: The "usermeta" table is populated with duplicate entries, leading to a larger database, and sometimes, leading to a high CPU usage
1.3.9.5
- New Option: "Settings" -- "Plugin Usage Preferences" -- "Plugin Access" / Choose user roles or particular users, apart from administrators, that could have access to the plugin area * e.g. the admin could give Asset CleanUp Pro access within the Dashboard to a developer that is optimizing the website, but the developer does not have the "administrator" role for security reasons
- "wpacu_access_role" filter is no longer active (related to the option mentioned above), as it wasn't 100% effective into changing who accesses the Asset CleanUp Pro area
- "Nextend Social Login and Register" plugin compatibility / Make sure the homepage is still detected if the following query string is in the URI: "nsl_bypass_cache"
- Fix: When oEmbed is disabled, make sure the REST route is also inactive
- Fix: When the plugin's main menu is hidden from the left sidebar, make sure the following option stays selected whenever a plugin page is accessed: "Settings" -- "Asset CleanUp"
1.3.9.4
- Option to manage critical CSS (in "CSS & JS Manager" » "Manage Critical CSS") from the Dashboard (add/update/delete), while keeping the option to use the "wpacu_critical_css" hook for custom/singular pages
- Preload CSS feature: When a .css file is preloaded (Basic), the "media" attribute is preserved if it's not missing and different than "all"
- Hardcoded assets' sorting: The assets are now sorted based on the option chosen in "Assets List Layout:" (e.g. if you sort them by their size, you can view the hardcoded assets from the largest one to the the smallest)
- "GTranslate" plugin compatibility: The JavaScript handle starting from "gt_widget_script_" and having a random number on each page reload gets an alias ("gt_widget_script_gtranslate") to avoid misinterpretation that the asset is a different one on each page reload (this way it could be unloaded, preloaded, etc.)
- Combined CSS/JS: Whenever a file from a plugin or a theme is updated by the developer/admin, there's no need to clear the cache afterwards, as sometimes, users forget about this; the plugin automatically recognizes the change and a new combined CSS/JS is created and re-cached
- CSS/JS manager: When the "src" of a SCRIPT tag or "href" of a LINK tag starts with "data:text/javascript;base64," and "data:text/css;base64," respectively, a note will be shown with the option to view the decoded CSS/JS code
- If the menu from the sidebar is not showing up, make sure that "Asset CleanUp" from "Settings" (Dashboard sidebar) is always highlighted, whenever a plugin page is visited
- Improvement: When using specific themes, the navigation sub-tabs from the "CSS & JS Manager" were overwritten by the theme's style (added unique references to the HTML classes)
- Improvement: Make sure the red background is kept whenever a load exception is unchecked if there was already an unloading rule set (this is more for aesthetics reasons)
- Improvement: Backend Speed - The plugin processes its PHP code faster, thus reducing the total processing time by ~50 milliseconds for non-cached pages (e.g. backend speed testing plugins such as "Query Monitor" and "Code Profiler" were used to optimize the PHP code)
- Improvement: CSS Minifier - Specific "var()" statements were minified incorrectly in Bootstrap / more: https://github.com/matthiasmullie/minify/issues/422
- Improvement: Added the option to change the way the assets are retrieved ("Direct" as if the admin is visiting the page / "WP Remote POST" as if a guest is visiting the page) from the CSS & JS manager within the Dashboard (for convenience, to avoid going through the "Settings" as it was the case so far)
- Improvement: Higher accuracy in detecting the "type" and "data-alt-type" attribute before determining if an inline SCRIPT tag has to be minified
- Improvement: In very rare cases in the "options" table, if "page_on_front" has a value and "show_on_front" is set to "posts" (this happens when there's an incomplete update of the settings in the database), it will confuse Asset CleanUp Pro and consider that "Your homepage displays" is actually set to "A static page" which is wrong
- Improvement: The plugin is optimised to load fewer functions then before (e.g. PHP classes that aren't required on the targeted page) in order to reduce the total front-end optimization time
- Improvement: Removed unused PHP code from specific files
- Improvement: CSS/JS Minifier - Prevent calling @is_file() when it's not the case to avoid on specific environments errors such as: "is_file(): open_basedir restriction in effect"
- Improvement: Whenever the following option is enabled, the META generator tags are stripped faster after being cached: 'HTML Source CleanUp' -- 'Remove All "generator" meta tags?'
- Improvement: Apply "font-display:" CSS property for Google Fonts when they are loaded via Web Font Loader (source: https://github.com/typekit/webfontloader)
- Rank Math & other SEO plugins compatibility: Prevent Asset CleanUp Pro from triggering, thus saving extra resources, whenever URIs such as /sitemap_index.xml are loaded to avoid altering the XML structure or generate 404 not found errors
- "WooCommerce" plugin compatibility: Avoid using extra resources in Asset CleanUp Pro to process specific CSS files (they are loading after the latest WooCommerce plugin release) that are already minified
- "SiteGround Optimizer" plugin compatibility: When enabled, on some environments, errors are triggering if Asset CleanUp's JavaScript minify option is turned on
- "GiveWP" plugin compatibility: Prevent Asset CleanUp Pro from loading whenever the URI is like /give/donation-form?giveDonationFormInIframe=1 as the page loaded within the iFrame is already optimized and there are users that had problems when Asset CleanUp Pro was triggering its rules there
- "GiveWP" plugin compatibility: Prevent CSS/JS minification as the files are already optimized and there's no point in wasting extra resources
- "Settings" -- Replaced text that sometimes caused confusion (e.g. some people didn't notice the small "if" and thought their caching directory is not writable)
- "Settings" -- "Plugin Usage Preferences": Re-organised the tab contents from into multiple sub-tabs for easier access and understanding the options
- "Settings" -- "Plugin Usage Preferences" - "Do not load on specific pages" -- "Prevent features of Asset CleanUp Pro from triggering on specific pages"; This allows you to stop triggering specific plugin features on certain pages (e.g. you might want to prevent combining JavaScript files on all /product/ (WooCommerce) pages due to some broken functionality on those specific pages)
- Fix: In some environments, the tags with "as" attribute were not properly detected (e.g. when "DOMDocument" is not enabled by default in the PHP configuration)
- Fix: Sometimes the "src" value was detected incorrectly on hardcoded assets due to the fact that the string "src=" was inside document.write() within the tags (which had no "src" attribute at all) / e.g. console.log('test'); document.write('');
- Fix: When "WP Remote Post" was used as a fetch method of the CSS/JS assets within the Dashboard, information about the targeted URL was showing up twice (e.g. the admin could be confused of viewing redundant text printing out)
- Fix: Make sure 'post__in' is never empty when called within a WP_Query whenever a post search is made within "CSS & JS Manager" -- "Manage CSS/JS"
- Fix: On some environments, FS_CHMOD_DIR and FS_CHMOD_FILE weren't defined, triggering errors such as: Uncaught Error: Undefined constant "WpAssetCleanUp\FS_CHMOD_DIR"
- Fix: In specific environments that loaded similar code to the one from Asset CleanUp Pro, errors were showing up, thus more uniqueness had to be added to avoid conflicts such as unique PHP namespaces
- Fix: On some environments, the following error would show up when WP CLI is used: "PHP Fatal error: Uncaught Error: Call to a member function getScriptAttributesToApplyOnCurrentPage() on null"
- Fix: Combined CSS/JS - The preload and stylesheet LINK tags had the same "id" attribute which shouldn't be like that as the "id" should be unique for each HTML element
- Fix: After a theme is switched, there's sometimes a browser error showing up related to multiple failed redirects
1.3.9.3
- WordPress 6.3 compatibility: Updated the code to avoid the following notice: "Function WP_Scripts::print_inline_script is deprecated since version 6.3.0"
- "WPML Multilingual CMS" plugin compatibility: Syncing post changes on all its associated translated posts / e.g. if you unload an asset on a page level in /contact/ (English) page, it will also be unloaded (synced) in /contacto/ (Spanish) and /kontakt/ (German) pages
- "WP Rocket" plugin compatibility: "Settings" -- "Optimize JavaScript" -- "Combine loaded JS (JavaScript) into fewer files" is automatically disabled when the following option is turned on in "WP Rocket": "File Optimization" -- "JavaScript Files" -- "Delay JavaScript execution"
- "Hide My WP Ghost – Security Plugin" plugin compatibility: Asset CleanUp's HTML alteration is done before the one of the security plugin so minify/combine CSS/JS will work fine
- "Site Kit by Google" plugin compatibility: JavaScript files from this plugin are added to the ignore list to avoid minifying as they are already minified (with just a few extra comments) and minifying them again, due to their particular structure, resulted in JS errors in the browser's console
- Improvement: Changed the name of the cached files to make them more unique as sometimes, handles that had UNIX timestamps and random strings (developers use them for various reason, including debugging), were causing lots of redundant files to be generated in the assets' caching directory
- Added jQuery Migrate script to the ignore list to avoid minifying it (along with jQuery leave it as it is, if the developer decided to load the large versions of the files, for debugging purposes)
- Front-end view: In the "Asset CleanUp" top admin bar menu, a new link is added that goes directly to the manage CSS/JS area for the current visited page for convenience
- Remove the usage of "/wp-content/cache/storage/_recent_items" directory from the CSS/JS caching directory as it was redundant to the caching functionality
- Option to skip "Cache Enabler" cache clearing via using the "WPACU_DO_NOT_ALSO_CLEAR_CACHE_ENABLER_CACHE" constant (e.g. set to 'true' in wp-config.php) - read more: https://www.assetcleanup.com/docs/?p=1502#wpacu-cache-enabler
- "Knowledge Base for Documents and FAQs" plugin: Do not show the CSS/JS manager at the bottom of the page when "Edit KB Article Page" is ON
- New "Brizy - Page Builder" setup: Prevent Asset CleanUp from triggering when the editor is ON
- Fix: "Do not load Asset CleanUp on this page (this will disable any functionality of the plugin)" - if turned ON, make sure the hardcoded list loads fine in the front-end view (Manage CSS/JS)
- Fix: Use the same "chmod" values from FS_CHMOD_DIR and FS_CHMOD_FILE (WordPress constants) for all the files and directories from the assets' caching directory when attempting to create a file/directory to avoid permission errors on specific environments
1.3.9.2
- New Option: Contract / Expand All Assets within an area (e.g. from a plugin)
- "Overview" area: Added notifications about deleted posts, post types, taxonomies and users, making the admin aware that some rules might not be relevant anymore (e.g. the admin uninstalled WooCommerce, but unload rules about "product" post types or a specific product page remained in the database)
- Stopped using the "error" class (e.g. on HTML DIV elements) and renamed it to "wpacu-error" as some plugins/themes sometimes interfere with it (e.g. not showing the error at all, thus confusing the admin)
- Keep the same strict standard for the values within the following HTML attributes: "id", "for" to prevent any errors by avoiding any interferences with other plugins
- Improvement: Only print the notice (as an HTML comment) about the "photoswipe" unload to the administrator (it's a special case where the HTML has to be hidden in case the CSS file gets unloaded)
- WPML Fix: Prevent Asset CleanUp from triggering whenever /?wpml-app=ate-widget is loaded (in some environments, the content returned was empty and the automatic translation area was not loading)
Previous versions
To check older logs, please refer to the separate
changelog.txt file within the root of the plugin directory!