InLine Small JS & CSS and Defer Parsing of JavaScript

Resolved og1
(@og1)

9 years, 2 months ago

Hi:

I must first commend the excellent work the Speed of Light team has done on this plugin. I can tell it’s stable and you used a design oriented philosophy for the user interface.

But more importantly, it’s the only caching plugin that does both page and browser caching with optimization for HTML/JS/CSS that does not break my site when all features that I mention are on doing what they are supposed to do (requiring me to spend hours removing plugins and then fixing my site to get it back like with other caching plugins, thus why I search far and wide for a caching plugin that took a new approach to the regular plugins which I believe have stability issues). Good work all round.

Now onto questions and suggestions for making the tool better.

If the HTML/JS/CSS optimization (minification, consolidation, defer JS parsing, etc.) are all on, why does is GTMetrix still say there are several JS and CSS files that should be Inline? It also says there are a couple JS files than can defer parsing to improve the page load/render performance. It also says the are several JS and CSS that could be minified. Because of this, I can’t get a high score on GTMetrix like I could with W3TC. Also, with W3TC I could get the http requests down to 32 on the home page. With Speed of Light the http requests are 60. So there’s a big difference on the ability of Speed of Light for page load optimization vs W3TC.

The Page Caching and Browser caching seem to both perform well though. My site is fast, though I think there is room for improvement on the load time to extremely fast.

That’s the questions and feedback on the HTML/JS/CSS optimization, page caching, and browser caching. The optimization could use some significant performance improvement, but if it’s at the expense of making it hit or miss that the plugin will break my site, then keep doing what you’re doing as it is now.

The last comment is a feature request, but again, not at the expense of making the plugin buggy like many of the others.

I’ve paired your caching plugin with “CDN Enabler” from KeyCDN. They work together great. It would be great if you could take what KeyCDN has done on their WordPress CDN Integration tool and build a solid CDN integration feature into your page caching function that has 99.99% stability and simplicity.

If you could achieve the above and not have a site break when I have page caching, browser caching, with HTML/JS/CSS optimization that rivals what I can get using W3TC, and have CDN integration that works 100% (meaning every file that should be on the CDN gets it’s url rewritten in the page build phase to use the CDN, not the case with several CDN integration plugins) I think you could have a million downloads active plugin.

If would be great to get a 6 months out view of your plans for the plugin.

Thanks for your help and time.

Viewing 5 replies - 1 through 5 (of 5 total)

Plugin Author JoomUnited
(@joomunited)

9 years, 2 months ago

Hi,

Thanks for your feedback! we appreciate that you take the time to fully test and compare.

1. About the GTMetrix and HTTP requests, I will let the developer reply to that 🙂 Though, I can say that the plugin logic is quite different, not technically but regarding the interface and configuration. We’ve taken the option to create a plugin that is “always” working with few technical configuration. In my opinion W3TC require some technical background to make a very advanced optimization.

2-3 I can’t give details on all the future versions 🙂 But we’ve planned to add:
– A possibility to include/exclude/order/defer the scripts loading from a visual interface
– A CDN integration
– A better main page builders automatic optimization
– A cache pre-loading tool

Cheers,

Plugin Author JoomUnited
(@joomunited)

9 years, 2 months ago

Hi,

Here the developer answer 🙂

It’s quite difficult to tell you why GTMetricx says something or not without a link to your web page.

Some files may not been minified because minification failed and it would result in breaking your website if theses files are served minified.

I would have to dig into W3TC to understand exactly how they deal with grouping file. But let me explain how we deal with grouping files.
We don’t group all files in a unique resulting file.
One of the main reason about that is because we think globally not only for one page.

Let’s say you have in your home page js files like jquery.js, moment.js, bootstrap.js, woocommerce.js and theme.js you can compress all of it in a big file to retrieve it in a single request.
But what will be the result in the second page if you have jquery.js, moment.js, bootstrap.js, calendar.js and theme.js? Note that I have removed woocommerce.js and added calendar.js that would be most of the time the case because each page loads its own plugin for its own feature.
Then you’ll have to download again a big grouped file.
You get it? Will you download a big file for each page you visit? Then browser cache will not be used over visiting pages?
By splitting the grouping feature we ensure that group of file can be cached and be reused over webpages
Also with the http2 feature you can simultaneously download these files which may be better than downloading a single big grouped file.

GTMetrix rules and all other of theses tools only check a single page.
It has to be weighted by many other aspects including global user experience over website navigation.

Best regards

Thread Starter og1
(@og1)

9 years, 2 months ago

Hi:

Thank you for the information.

Yes, those four features should be the focus from my view.

The CDN integration would be great to cover off first as I consider it base functionality in this day and age of large content websites that are expected to be near instantaneous. It’s very hard to beat defeat physics and the CDN is key to UX in my view.

Not: There’s a CDN integration issue where very specific images don’t load from the CDN, even the the image is on the CDN, but comes from the host (yes, your CDN integration tool experiences the issue as well as others I’ve test) I’ve been working with Beaver Builder that I’ll detail in my reply to your developer.

Thanks for the help and time. Appreciated.

Thread Starter og1
(@og1)

9 years, 2 months ago

Hi:

Thanks for the development items reply. Appreciated.

You points are all valid. Good feedback. I’m also interested how http/2 will change things and have been stuying it recently. Unfortunately Bluehost hasn’t said a word on if they even have plans to implement http/2 and I don’t expect they are in any hurry to roll http/2 out. I.e They can’t be happy with activities such as Let’s Encrypt giving away SSL certificates to push adoption of http/2.

Note: I miss-typed on the note above with the CDN issue. I was trying to give you a heads up as you design your CDN integration efforts for Speed of Light. The CDN issue I mention comes from a specific slider used for images where Beaver Builder uses the WP function called (wp_prepare_attachment_for_js). Apparently the developer at WPTC agreed they don’t account for this function being used, and that could be a reason why the url in the page build is not re-written and the images are forced to use the host vs the CDN with W3TC. Not sure if this is the same case with your plans for Speed of Light’s CDN integration.

The behaviour on my page with a specific slider where it seems wp_prepare_attachment_for_js is used is exactly the same between CDN Enabler (from KeyCDN) and the Speed of Light caching plugin and Beaver Builder versus the behaviour using W3TC with integrated CDN and Beaver Builder.

If I get the CDN integration working 99.99% where most of my content that should be coming from the CDN is in fact coming from the CDN integrated with page caching, browser cashing, and HTML/JS/CSS optimization I’d be quite happy. The items having to do with minifying and paralelisation of HTML/JSS/CS I believe are secondary to the CDN integration and issues I’m seeing with all plugins building pages so the CDN is used fully. There’s room for improvement, but I really like what you’ve done with the plugin so far. The performance and UX of the site is good.

Thanks for the help and time. Appreciated.

Plugin Author JoomUnited
(@joomunited)

9 years, 2 months ago

OK thanks for your feedback, we’ll take a look when we’ll develop that new version.

Have a nice day, cheers,

Viewing 5 replies - 1 through 5 (of 5 total)

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