optimizing matters

Don’t take free & open source for granted; donate to Mozilla!

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Do you ❤️ the free and open web and do you want to ensure a non-profit can continue to play an important role? Do you use Firefox or use MDN (Mozilla Developer Network) to check up on JS or CSS or HTML syntax?
We do too and as from today Optimizing Matters will donate $20 monthly. If you use Autoptimize or Async JavaScript or WP YouTube Lyte then please, pretty please, consider donating at https://donate.mozilla.org too.

New: Autoptimize CriticalCSS.com Power-Up released!

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The Autoptimize criticalcss.com Power-up has just been released to the wordpress.org plugin repository!
This plugin integrates with and extends Autoptimize. It integrates with criticalcss.com, a premium service which uses a “headless” browser to extract real critical CSS. That way it  fully automates the extraction of high-quality critical CSS and the creation of rules for that critical CSS. It can work 100% automated, but also allows semi-automated jobs (where you enter a URL for which you want a specific rule, the power-up will do the rest) and manual rules (where you create the rule and add critical CSS yourself).

Want to test automated Critical CSS creation?

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Over 3 years ago Autoptimize added support for critical CSS and one and a half year ago the first “power-up” was released for Critical CSS rules creation.
But time flies and it’s time for a new evolution; automated creation of critical CSS, using a deep integration with https://criticalcss.com using their powerful API! A first version of the plugin is ready and the admin-page looks like this (look to the right of this paragraph);
The plan:

  1. beta-test (asap)
  2. release as separate plugin on wordpress.org (shooting for April)
  3. release as part of Autoptimize 2.5 (target mid 2018)

This new “criticalcss.com” power-up has been tested on a couple of sites already (including this little blog of mine) and we are now looking for a small group of to help beta-test for that first target.  Beta-testers will be able to use criticalcss.com for free during the test (i.e. for one month). If you’re interested; head on up to the contact form and tell me what kind or site you would test this on (main plugins + theme; I’m very interesting in advanced plugins like WooCommerce, BuddyPress and some of the major themes such as Avada, Divi, Astra, GeneratePress, … ) and I’ll get back to you with further instructions.
 

Autoptimize 2.3, the Happy New Year release

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I just released Autoptimize 2.3.0, the Happy New Year release. As described here earlier it has some significant extra optimizations to help you improve your site’s performance even more for 2018:

  • new: optimize Google fonts with “combine & link” and “combine and load async” (with webload.js), intelligently preconnecting to Google’s domains to limit performance impact even further
  • new: Async JS, can be applied to local or 3rd party JS (if local it will be auto-excluded from autoptimization)
  • new: support to tell browsers to preconnect (= dns lookup + tcp/ip connection + ssl negotiation) to 3rd party domains (depends on browser support, works in Chrome & Firefox)
  • new: remove WordPress’ Core’s emoji CSS & JS
  • new: remove (version parameter from) Querystring
  • new: support to clear cache through WP CLI thanks to junaidbhura
  • lots of bugfixes and small improvements done by some seriously smart people via GitHub (thanks all!!), including a fix for AO 2.2 which saw the HTML minifier go PacMan on spaces in some circumstances.

Enjoy! :;-)

Small experiment; Autoptimize with page cache

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So I integrated a page cache (based on KeyCDN Cache Enabler) in Autoptimize, just to see how easy (or difficult) it would be. Turns out it was pretty easy, mostly because Cache Enabler (based on Cachify, which was very popular in Germany until the developer abandoned Cachify) is well-written, simple and efficient. 🙂

No plans to release this though. Or do you think I should?

Quick heads-up: Autoptimize 2.1.2 and 2.2.1 release, includes security fix

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[Updated 23/06 to reflect newer versions 2.1.2 and 2.2.1]
Heads-up: Autoptimize 2.2 has just been released with a slew of new features (see changelog) and an important security-fix. Do upgrade as soon as possible.
If you prefer not to upgrade to 2.2 (because you prefer the stability of 2.1.0), you can instead download 2.1.2, which is identical to 2.1.0 except that the security fix has been backported.
I’ll follow up on the new features and on the security issue in more detail later today/ tomorrow.

Autoptimize 2.2 coming your way, care to test?

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So work on Autoptimize 2.2 is almost finished and I need your help testing this version before releasing (targeting May, but that depends on you!). The more people I have testing, the faster I might be able to push this thing out and there’s a lot to look forward to;

  • New option: enable/ disable AO for logged in users for all you pagebuilders out there
  • New option: enable/ disable AO for cart/ checkout pages of WooCommerce, Easy Digital Downloads & WP eCommerce
  • New minification/ caching system, significantly speeding up your site for non-cached pages (previously part of a power-up)
  • Switched to rel=preload + Filamentgroup’s loadCSS for CSS deferring
  • Additional support for HTTP/2 setups (no GUI, you might need to have a look at the API to see/ use all possibilities)
  • Important improvements to the logic of which JS/ CSS can be optimized (getPath function) increasing reliability of the aggregation process
  • Updated to a newer version of the CSS Minification component (albeit not the 3.x one, which seems a tad too fresh and which would require me to drop support for PHP 5.2 which will come but just not yet)
  • API: Lots of extra filters, making AO (even) more flexible.
  • Lots of bugfixes and smaller improvements (see GitHub commit log)

So if you want to help:

  1. Download the zip-file from Github
  2. Overwrite the contents of wp-content/plugins/autoptimize with the contents of autoptimize-master from the zip
  3. Test and if any bug (regression) create an issue in GitHub (if it doesn’t exist already).

Very much looking forward to your feedback!