Earlier today I got this question on the wordpress.org support forum for Autoptimize;
Will there be Google fonts support in the future? I now include the google font’s like this:
wp_enqueue_style( 'google-fonts', '//fonts.googleapis.com/css?family=Open+Sans:400italic,600italic,400,700,600|Varela+Round' );
Is it possible to add this css to the combined and minified by this plugin file?
The basic question if Autoptimize can aggregate external resources has been asked before and I felt it was time to dig in.
I did a little test, requesting the same Google Font CSS, changing browser user agents. For my good ole Firefox on Ubuntu Linux I got (snippet);
@font-face {
font-family: 'Open Sans';
font-style: normal;
font-weight: 400;
src: local('Open Sans'), local('OpenSans'), url(http://fonts.gstatic.com/s/opensans/v13/cJZKeOuBrn4kERxqtaUH3VtXRa8TVwTICgirnJhmVJw.woff2) format('woff2'), url(http://fonts.gstatic.com/s/opensans/v13/cJZKeOuBrn4kERxqtaUH3T8E0i7KZn-EPnyo3HZu7kw.woff) format('woff');
}
Whereas the exact same request with an MSIE7 useragent gives (again, extract);
@font-face {
font-family: 'Open Sans';
font-style: normal;
font-weight: 400;
src: url(http://fonts.gstatic.com/s/opensans/v13/cJZKeOuBrn4kERxqtaUH3fY6323mHUZFJMgTvxaG2iE.eot);
}
It’s not surprising Google has specific CSS based on browser useragent (probably browser-version), but this is a simple example of how dynamic remote CSS or JS can be (the scala of variables that could lead to 3rd parties serving up different CSS/JS is huge, really).
So although theoretically it would be possible to have AO cache remote JS/CSS (such as Google Font’s) and include it in the aggregated CSS- or JS-file (and that way removing render blocking resources), the problem is that AO will never be able to apply whatever logic the 3rd party applies when getting requests. Hence the design decision (made by the original developer, Turl, a long long time ago) not to aggregate & minify external resources. This is how it should be.
