I’ve been working hard on cutting down page speed bottlenecks, especially in preparation for the upcoming 2021 Web Vitals being used as a ranking factor by Google.

I did quite a few things including switching to a lighter theme (GeneratePress Premium) and removing “junk” and bloat. However, the problem is that lots of JS & CSS is loaded site-wide by plugins, even when not used!

While Asset CleanUp’s competitor, PerfMatters, can help, it falls short because they don’t provide a way to unload hardcoded CSS as I use for some customization & my product tables. Asset CleanUp Pro does this and I’m getting very good results.

Essentially, it offers several “trim the fat” features that ordinarily, you’d need a PHP snippet for, making that easier. Also, you can use conditional controls to unload plugins & your CSS etc. on certain posts/pages. Of course, you can do this site-wide as well (based on URL, post type, page type, and more) from the dashboard or in a post/page.

Long story short, I was able to pass all Web Vitals in Pagespeed Insights and achieve scores of 97-100 (mobile) for 95% of my posts & pages on both sites with Asset CleanUp Pro after removing bloat & tweaking.

Also, Gabe responded to my customer support inquiry and has mentioned new conditional controls will be coming soon which is great. I appreciate the attention to detail.

Well worth the money! I’m very happy with it. It’s not a “magic” solution (nothing is, and that’s not possible anyway) but does what it’s supposed to well and is giving me the control that, sadly, is not built into plugins already.

Note: If you’re new to page speed optimization, it’s best to do some reading and learn more in order to use it properly. Simply turning stuff off often breaks needed JS & CSS if you’re not sure what you’re doing. I had to learn a bit, myself. That, or you’re (1) not addressing the correct issue, or (2) are not using it properly.

Thanks, Gabe! 🙂

• This topic was modified 7 months ago by martymcleod.