Hi @minhducdev
Thank you so much for the kind words and for taking the time to share such thoughtful feedback — we truly appreciate it!
Regarding performance and optimization, we completely agree that this is a critical area, and it’s something we actively work on.
Plugin size optimization
In one of the recent releases, we made a significant step in this direction. As noted in the changelog:
Put the plugin on a diet – performed a cleanup, reducing plugin size.
Here’s what that included. We now ship only minified CSS and JS files (no unminified source files in production builds).
- We removed legacy font formats that are no longer needed.
- We cleaned up unused PHP library files and other redundant assets.
As a result, the uncompressed size of the Lite plugin was reduced by approximately 7MB, which improves install size, update time, and overall footprint.
Conditional asset loading
WPForms loads its frontend assets only on pages where a form is present. In typical simple setups, that means around 9 assets.
The only exception is a small set of core stylesheet files (currently three), which are loaded globally. The reason is architectural: forms can be rendered dynamically in multiple unpredictable contexts — inside widgets, footers, theme hooks, popups, or injected by page builders. Because of this variability, fully deferring those base styles can lead to rendering inconsistencies.
That said, we continuously evaluate ways to reduce this baseline further without compromising reliability.
Async / defer attributes
This is a great suggestion and absolutely aligned with modern performance best practices.
At the moment, some of our scripts depend on jQuery and on specific execution order guarantees. When scripts rely on jQuery (which itself must load first and in order), blindly applying async can break dependency chains.
defer is generally safer because it preserves execution order while delaying execution until after HTML parsing, but compatibility needs to be carefully validated across the wide variety of WordPress themes, builders, and third-party integrations our users rely on.
We’re actively exploring improvements in this area — including reducing jQuery reliance over time — to make the frontend even more lightweight and modern.
We genuinely appreciate performance-focused feedback like yours. Optimization is not a one-time task — it’s an ongoing process — and thoughtful suggestions from users help push us forward.
Thanks again for the review and recommendation!
