JavaScript often has to be excluded from being aggregated due to inline JS depending on it. That’s why Autoptimize 2.9 will also have to option to defer inline JS, allowing all JS to be deferred, even that pesky jQuery. As seen in below screenshot exclusions obviously will be honored for both inline and linked JS so you will be able to tweak everything just right.
The settings for JavaScript optimization also have been reshuffled, making “also aggregate inline JS”, “force JS in head” and “try/catch wrapping” sub-options of “Aggregate JS” (so hidden on the screenshot as “aggregate JS” is off), whereas “Defer inline JS” is a sub-option of “Don’t aggregate but defer”.
So we have per post/ page AO settings and we now have “also defer inline JS” for what will become 2.9. And there’s more to come …
Month: April 2021
Autoptimize enhancement: feedback wanted
I’m in the process of adding a per page/ post option to disable Autoptimization.
In the current state of this work in process one can disable Autoptimize entirely on a post/ page or disable just JS optimization as you can see on the screenshot.
Now my question to you, Autoptimize user, is; what other options of below list _have_ to go in that metabox taking into account the list should be between 3 and 5 items long?
- CSS optimization (which includes Critical CSS)
- Critical CSS usage/ Inline & defer CSS
- HTML optimization
- Image optimization
- Image Lazyload
- Google Font optimization
- Preload (from “extra” tab)
- Preconnect (from “extra” tab)
- Async (from “extra” tab)
Autoptimize 2.8.2 update “mishap” postmortem
This morning I finally pushed Autoptimize 2.8.2 out of the gates which was a relatively minor release with misc. small improvements/ bugfixes. Only it proved not that minor as it broke some sites after the update, so here’s a quick postmortem.
Timeline
- 7h33 CEST: I pushed out 2.8.2
- 7h56 CEST: first forum post about a Fatal PHP error due to
wp-content/plugins/autoptimize/classes/external/php/ao-minify-html.phpmissing - 7h58 CEST: second forum post confirming issue
- 8h01 CEST: responded to both forum posts asking if file was indeed missing on filesystem
- 8h04 CEST: I changed the “stable version” back to 2.8.1 to stop 2.8.2 from being pushed out.
- 8h07 CEST: forum post replies confirming the file was indeed missing from the filesystem
- 8h15 CEST: I pushed out 2.8.3 with the fix
- 8h22 CEST: confirmed fixed by first user
- 8h26 CEST: confirmed fixed by second user
Root cause analysis
One of the improvements was changing the classname of the HTML minifier to avoid W3 Total Cache’s HTML minifier being used. For this purpose not only small changes were made to the HTML minifier code, but the file was also renamed from minify-html.php into ao-minify-html.php. The file itself was present on my local filesystem, but I did *not* svn add it, so it was never propagated to the wordpress.org SVN server, resulting in it not being in the 2.8.2 zip-file causing the PHP Fatal “require(): Failed opening required” errors.
Conclusions
Every svn ci has be proceeded by an svn stat, always. I’ve updated my “go live” procedure to reflect that.
Additionally; I strongly advise against automatic updates for Autoptimize (and I don’t auto-update any plugin myself), not only for major f-ups like mine today, but also because any change to how (auto-)optimization works needs to be tested for regressions. And if you have a site that generates money somehow, you really should have a staging site (which can auto-update) to test updates on before applying on production.