David Clough, author of the Async JavaScript WordPress plugin contacted me on March 5th to ask me if I was interested to take over ownership of his project. Fast-forward to the present; I will release a new version of AsyncJS on March 13th on wordpress.org, which will:
- integrate all “pro” features (that’s right, free for all)
- include some rewritten code for easier maintenance
- be fully i18n-ready (lots of strings to translate 🙂 )
I will provide support on the wordpress.org forum (be patient though, I don’t have a deep understanding of code, functionality & quirks yet). I also have some more fixes/ smaller changes/ micro-improvements in mind (well, a Trello-board really) for the next release, but I am not planning major changes or new functionality. But I vaguely remember I said something similar about Autoptimize a long time ago and look where that got me …
Anyway, kudo’s to David for a great plugin with a substantial user-base (over 30K active installations) and for doing “the right thing” (as in not putting it on the plugin-market in search for the highest bidder). I hope I’ll do you proud man!
Is there any sense to use Async JS plugin with Autoptimize?
AO has a “async” field in the “Extra”-tab, but that requires some technical knowledge (it’s marked “advanced users” after all). The Async JS plugin is more user-friendly in that respect (with a GTMetrix-based wizard even) plus you can “defer” instead of async and it integrates nicely with AO to allow one to switch the AO’ed JS from “defer” to “async”, so yes, it might make sense to use both 🙂
I’m not an expert by any means, but I found the best results using both.
Autoptimize + Async JavaScript is indeed performance awesome sauce.