autoptimize

Want to know some Autoptimize secrets?

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There’s a first for everything and so last week I did a presentation at a WordPress Meetup in Antwerp titled “Autoptimize: 5 secrets and an intermezzo” which at least I had fun with.

You can find a PDF export of the presentation here.

Questions go below, in the comments (or in the form on the contact page).

Autoptimize Pro 1.3; instant.page

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New booster in Autoptimize Pro 1.3: instant.page, a 3rd party JS component that can significantly improve performance for visitors going from one page to another on your site by preloading a page based on visitor behavior.

Do take into account that it could increase the number of page requests as the preloaded page might end up not being requested after all.

More info on https://instant.page.

AOPro 1.2; delay JS, CSS & HTML as long as you want

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Autoptimize Pro has “Boosters” to delay JavaScript (esp. interesting for external resources), CSS and HTML (which can be very impactful for long and/ or complex pages). Up until today’s release the delay was either until user interaction OR a set timeout of 5 seconds, but now you can choose the delay time yourself, setting it to e.g. 20s or 3s or -and that’s where things get a teeny bit shady- 0s to disable the time-out, waiting for user-interaction to load the delayed resources.

Setting the delay to 0 is a bit shady because at that point you are hiding those assets for performance tests which -although artificial- is likely to improve (lab test) performance scores. If you do use the 0s delay then do take into account that *real* users will still need to load/ render those assets and that that still may be a sub-optimal experience.

Adding PHP 8.2 in travis tests

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Phew, getting php 8.2 working in my plugin’s travis tests required quite a bit of trial & error in travis.yaml, but 8 commits later I won 😉

The solution was in these extra lines to ensure libonig5 was installed;

matrix:
  include: 
  - dist: focal
    php: 8.2
    env: LIBONIG_INSTALL=1

install:
  # for PHP 8.2 install libonig
  - if [ -n "$LIBONIG_INSTALL" ]; then sudo apt-get install libonig5; fi

Autoptimize Pro released, secret discount code here ;-)

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Autoptimize ProSo Autoptimize Pro has finally been released, somewhat secretively (I like flying under the radar).

All info about features can be found on https://autoptimize.com/pro/ including a 20% early birds discount code, but if you use my internet nickname/ handle of whatever you want to call it (it’s part of the domain of this blog and has 3 t’s in it 😉) as coupon code between now and November 16th, you’ll get an even bigger discount!

Be quick, your website will be too 😉

Autoptimize Pro is coming, 10 beta-testers needed!

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It has been long overdue, but I’m finally almost ready to release Autoptimize Pro. The first version of AO Pro (an add-on to be installed on top off Autoptimize) will have Image optimization, CDN, fully automated critical CSS and a number of “boosters” to improve performance even more, with more features are in the backlog.

autoptimize pro boosters screenshot

If you’re interested in beta-testing fill out the form below and based on data submitted I’ll pick 10 beta-testers. As a beta-tester you’ll be able to use AO Pro free of charge until the end of the year.

Beta-testing is being finalized, I am currently not looking for additional testers.

Autoptimize 3.1 released

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Autoptimize 3.1 was just released with some new features and some fixes/ improvements:

  • new: HTML sub-option: “minify inline CSS/ JS” (off by default).
  • new: Misc option: permanently allow the “do not run compatibility logic” flag to be removed (which was set for users upgrading from AO 2.9.* to AO 3.0.* as the assumption was things were working anyway).
  • security: improvements to the critical CSS settings page to fix authenticated cross site scripting issues as reported by WPScan Security.
  • bugfix: “defer inline JS” of very large chunks of inline JS could cause server errors (PCRE crash actually) so not deferring if string is more then 200000 characters (filter available).
  • some other minor changes/ improvements/ hooks, see the GitHub commit log

I got some questions about why and how of the “Disable extra compatibility logic?” option, here’s some more info copy/pasted from my answer on the WordPress support forum:

well, back in the 3.0 days the assumption was that for existing and thus confirmed working installations the compatibility logic brought no advantages and *could* cause regressions, hence compatibility was disabled for those (there are no complex/ heavy queries in the compatibility code).

this new option gives users of “older installations” the option to enable compatibility anyway, but as it is only useful in case of problems, I would advice to keep it off unless something is broken and only then to enable it to see if is automatically fixes the issue 🙂

Happy optimizing! 🙂

Autoptimize troubleshooting howto

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Autoptimize can help improve your site’s performance, but in some cases after installing and activating you might encounter issues with your site. Although frustrating and maybe even scary, these problems can generally be easily resolved by re-configuring Autoptimize and I’ll be happy to share how you can do that.

First off: if the problem is limited to just one (or two) page(s), go to that page’s edit screen and in the “Autoptimize this page” metabox simply disable “optimize this page” and forget about it (or if you want to be more specific you candisable just “optimize JS” or “optimize CSS” or “lazyload images” or …).

If the problem is more widespread, then try to identify what is breaking things by just disabling CSS or JS or HTML or Image optimization (incl. lazyload). Keep in mind you might have to clear your page cache after a configuration change (depending on your setup this might be a page caching plugin or on the server or at host level or at a 3rd party such as Sucuri or Cloudflare).

If the problem goes away by disabling CSS optimization, reactivate it and

  1. If “aggregate CSS” and “also aggregate Inline CSS” are on, first try disabling “also aggregate inline CSS” and if still broken try also disabling “aggregate CSS”
  2. Try adding wp-content/themes to exclude the theme CSS from being optimized
  3. Try adding wp-content/plugins to exclude all plugins CSS from being optimized, if that works you can try narrowing it down further by excluding specific plugins e.g. wp-content/plugins/elementor

If the problem goes away by disabling JS optimization, reactivate it and

  1. Check the browser console for relevant JavaScript errors (see this wordpress.org support article for info on how to do that)
  2. If you see “jQuery is not defined“-errors on the browser console, make sure wp-includes/js/jquery/jquery.min.js is not aggregated (add it to the JS optimization exclusion field) or asynced/ deferred in any way.
  3. If “aggregate JS” is active, try switching to “don’t aggregate but defer”, optionally with “also defer inline JS” on as well (in which case you can likely remove at least the default exclusions).
  4. Try adding wp-content/themes to exclude the theme JS from being optimized
  5. Try adding wp-content/plugins to exclude all plugins JS from being optimized, if that works you can try narrowing it down further by excluding specific plugins e.g. wp-content/plugins/elementor (example in screenshot above: koko to exclude all Koko Analytics JS)

Image optimization or lazyload issues can be fixed by excluding the image(s) from those optimizations by either excluding (part) of the image path (e.g. wp-content/uploads/2022/10/whatever.jpg) or if the <img tag has a e.g. class attribute excluding by class-name (e.g. img-fancybox-hidden).

If the problem is with HTML minification, just keep that off, it’s not very important. Obviously, if you have some of the options on the “Extra” tab active, try deactivating them one by one.

If all of the above fails, there is always free quality support offered over on the wordpress.org Autoptimize support forums! 🙂

Autoptimize 3.0 almost done, want to test?

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Work on Autoptimize 3.0 is almost finished and it has some big changes both functionally and technically;

  • fundamental change for new installations: by default Autoptimize will not aggregate JS/ CSS any more (HTTP/2 is ubiquitous and there are other advantages to not aggregating esp. re. inline JS/ CSS and dependencies)
  • new: no API needed any more to create manual critical CSS rules.
  • new: “disable global styles” option on the “Extra” tab.
  • new: compatibility logic for “edit with Elementor”, “revolution slider”, for non-aggregated inline JS requiring jQuery even if not excluded (= auto-exclude of jQuery) and JS-heavy WordPress blocks (Gutenberg)
  • improvement: defer inline now also allowed if inline JS contains nonce or post_id.
  • improvement: settings export/ import on critical CSS tab now takes into account all Autoptimize settings, not just the critical CSS ones.
  • technical improvement: all criticalCSS classes were refactored, removing use of global variables.
  • technical improvement: automated unit tests on Travis-CI for PHP versions 7.2 to 8.1.
  • fix: stop Divi from clearing Autoptimize’s cache which is pretty counter-productive.
  • misc smaller fixes/ improvements, see the GitHub commit log

Obviously given the amount of changes, thorough non-regression tests are required and that’s where you come in; you can download Autoptimize 3 beta from GitHub and install it instead of 2.9.5.1.

As some of the changes (esp. the new defaults for CSS & JS optimization) are only applicable to new installations (so not upgrades from 2.9.x), having that tested would be much appreciated as well 🙂

Looking forward to your feedback people!

peace & love,
frank