Why You Need to Speed Up WordPress
The customer is always right! Even if he’s impatient and doesn’t want to wait until the page with the unique offer loads. A customer leaves a slow website and goes to competitors. Google also ranks fast and optimized websites higher in search results. Today you will learn about the easy and useful plugin that can help to speed up WordPress websites and solve a lot of SEO problems. So meet Clearfy – the WordPress optimization plugin. More than 40,000 people around the globe use this amazing plugin. Our analytics study user needs daily, so developers could prepare regular updates based on actual needs.
Why You Don’t Need Scripts
The free Clearfy plugin optimizes your website by solving one of the most important problems affecting the speed – excessive load of CSS and JavaScript (JS) files.
Let’s see this on example. There is a plugin that generates a contact form – Contact Form 7. Usually, this form is used on a single page. But the plugin installs scripts and styles to all pages and slows down the page speed. Unfortunately, that is a common practice for most plugins. And developers don’t see any problems with it.
You can find “unwanted” scripts pretty easy. Open a website page and go to the dev console: press Ctrl+U and find Contact Form 7 in the source code. You’ll see that Contact Form 7 loads style.css on the home page…
… along with another script – includes/script/js.
But the contact form is missing on this page.
So let’s find out why it’s wrong. Go to File Manager and search for Contact Form 7:
Go to Includes => css => style.css (1.6 KB):
The scripts file from the js folder weights 14.2 KB.
It means that 2 requests are generated to load scripts and CSS files on all pages. And these files load whenever a user visits your website.
That’s why you need to speed up WordPress websites and optimize Contact Form 7. Especially for multipage websites with a contact form on one page. However, you don’t need to optimize Contact Form 7 on a single-page website (landing).
See for yourself: copy the website URL to GTmetrix and press Analyze. You’ll get the following data:
Page load time – 1.4 sec. Total page size – 557 KB. Total requests – 44.
How to Set Up WordPress Scripts & Styles Manager with Clearfy
Install and activate the free Clearfy plugin. Go to its menu:
You’ll need Assets Manager.
Assets manager is activated by default. If it’s not activated, go to Performance => Assets manager and make sure the settings look this way:
Disable unwanted scripts, styles, and fonts. There is Assets manager in the admin bar. Press it to see the list of loaded scripts, styles, and fonts on the current page.
You can enable/disable CSS and JS files in posts, custom posts, and pages. We recommend testing scripts features on the local hosting or a test website. Disabling important system files and scripts can destroy the website.
If you are not sure what a particular file does, follow the link under the file’s title and see developer comments with the plugin description. Once you get to know plugin features, you’ll learn how to enable/disable scripts & styles and speed up WordPress.
Universal Clearfy
Advantages of using Clearfy:
- Multifunctional solution: all in one.
- We gather only useful and demanded webmaster tools. You don’t have to think about optimization anymore. All the necessary features have already been implemented in Clearfy.
- You can disable unwanted features. This plugin is like a builder: you can use only necessary tools. Unused features don’t produce any load and don’t cause performance issues.
- One interface for all features and modules.
- Internal settings cache. The plugin doesn’t produce many requests to the database.
- Optimized and tested by a professional team of developers.
- Protected from external threats.
- You can copy Clearfy settings to another website. Time-saving solution to maintain chains of websites.
- Regular updates.
- Free guides and supports 7 days a week.
Potential Downsides of Clearfy:
- A complex tool. Requires time to go through the settings.
- Powerful and multipurpose solution. Not the best choice if you plan to use only 1-2 plugin features. For such matters, download and install free Clearfy add-on – Assets manager.
We strongly recommend checking the detailed list of Clearfy features. You may face new challenges in maintaining websites, and our product can help. Keep in mind that it’s better to install one high-quality plugin than multiple plugins for each task.
Author: Sergey Roshka