depends on your site and your configuration mate
^what he said.
Is your site responsive (for mobile visitors) or is it configured to use an alternate, mobile-specific, served page?
For Speed, the way Google’s Page Speed Insights works is that for mobiles it gives a lot of importance to inling critical css and deferring the full css. So it needs “inline and defer css”. W3TC doesn’t do it.
This plugin Autoptimize and forum may help: https://wordpress.org/support/topic/eliminate-render-blocking-css-1?replies=17
@kimberly : Yea site is responsive (same version for all, web to mobile)
@superpoincare : But there are these options under W3TC? under Minify detailed configurations?
Thanks everyone for helping. Any other suggestions particularly on configuring W3TC to optimise mobile speed because we have too many live sites using it to change to another performance and caching top plugin.
@superpoincare is correct in that to at least prevent/reduce the render blocking delay and imrpove page download times you would defer/asyn your scripts and/or css. w3tc has an option to defer or async for javascript but has nothing for css. The problem with using async and defer is it isnt available in all browsers. They both do slightly different things btw.
As such the more ideal way would be to minify all your scripts and css and have them placed just before the </body> close tag. That way your page will load relatively quicker than before since there is no longer any block rendering happening. The consequence though is you will see your un-styled page for a few moments before re-styling correctly. I can’t remember the proper techincal name for that.
Because minified css files dont offer the choice to put just before the </body> you would have to include a <!-- W3TC-include-css --> comment tag to let w3tc where to put it.
It’s going to take time to get things minified and your site to work properly before you shoudl attempt to tackle the render blocking issue.
Btw, most sites (90%+) dont even bother to deal with removing render blocking.
Another way to improve speeds is to utilize a CDN such as the free Cloudflare.
Yeah, most sites don’t use it. Some don’t like the FOUC (Flash of unstylized content) but others simply don’t know about it. Google has been pushing this idea to make it more widespread.
I initially thought putting the <!– W3TC-include-css –> is a good idea: https://wordpress.org/support/topic/use-minified-files-output?replies=10#post-7277172
but later realized that it’s still render blocking. This is because the browser parses the HTML much earlier than it is acting upon it and as soon is it meets <link href= … it will block render.
So a correct approach is to use javascript instead so that the browser doesn’t block render and Autoptimize uses javascript to load the CSS and inserts it when the DOM is ready.
