Autoptimize 2.5 is almost ready! It features a new “Images”-tab to house all Image optimization options, including support for lazy-loading images and WebP (the only next-gen image format that really matters, no?);
So download the beta and test lazy-loading and WebP (and all of the other changes) and let me know of any issue you might find!
You know that frustrating Google PageSpeed Insights opportunity “Defer unused CSS”? Well, it’s going to be renamed soon (in Lighthouse first, so GPSI should follow) as per this Github merged pull request;
The full text will read;
Remove unused CSS
Remove dead rules from stylesheets and defer the loading of CSS not used for above-the-fold content to reduce unnecessary bytes consumed by network activity.
So should Autoptimize include Google Quicklink or the similar instant.page JS?
Your opinion matters! :-)
It took a lot of time for WP YouTube Lyte to get there, but we finally got to 20 000 active installs, and to celebrate that occasion I release a long overdue update (1.7.6), with the following improvements;
And in case you’re wonder, this how a LYTE video looks like;
(Thom Yorke, Unmade from his Susperia soundtrack, live. I have been looking for something more upbeat in my YouTube favorites playlist, but this ultimately is what I want to share now. Sorry if.)
Update 4th Feb: the HTML minify bug was fixed in W3TC v. 0.9.7.2, released a couple of days ago.
Update 19th Feb: I’m still seeing issues caused by W3TC, seems like not all is fixed fully yet.
Quick heads-up for users that have both W3 Total Cache and Autoptimize installed; the latest W3TC update (version 0.9.7.1) introduces a nasty bug in the HTML minifier which also impacts Autoptimize as that uses the same minifier class (Minify_HTML, part of Mr. Clay’s Minify). When W3TC is running the Minify_HTML class is loaded by and from W3TC, meaning AO’s autoload does not have to load the Minify_HTML from AO proper (which does not have that problem).
The bug sees some characters, esp. quotes disappear from the HTML leading to all sorts of .. weirdness from Pinterest icons not showing over mis-aligned titles in RevSlider to broken custom share buttons and more.
If you’re impacted by the bug, you can do one of the following;
Fingers crossed they’ll release an update soon!
2018 is end of life and 2019 will be released soon. Autoptimize 2.5 is not at that point yet, but I just pushed a version to GitHub which adds image lazy loading to Autoptimize;
The actual lazy-loading is implemented by the integrated lazysizes JS lazy loader which has a lot of options some of which I will experiment with and bring to Autoptimize to the default improve user experience.
If you want you can download the beta (2.5.0-beta2) now from Github (disable 2.4.4 before activating the beta) and start using the new functionality immediately. And if you have feedback; shoot, I’ll be happy to take your remarks with me to bring AO 2.5 ready for release (I’m targeting March, but we’ll see).
Enjoy the celebrations and have a great 2019!
Autoptimize by default excludes inline JS and jquery.js from optimization. Inline JS is excluded because it is a typical cache-buster (due to changing variables in it) and as inline JS often requires jQuery being available as a consequence that needs to be excluded as well. The result of this “safe default” however is that jquery.js is a render-blocking resource. So even if you’re doing “inline & defer CSS” your Start-Render time (or one of the variations thereof) will be sub-optimal.
Jonas, the smart guy behind criticalcss.com, proposed to embed inline JS that requires jQuery in a function that executes after the DomContentLoaded event. And so I created a small code snippet as a proof of concept which hooks into Autoptimize’s API and that seems to work just fine;
The next step is having some cutting-edge Autoptimize users test this in the wild. You can view/ download the code from this gist and add it as a code snippet (or if you insist in your theme’s functions.php). Your feedback is more then welcome, I’m sure you know where to find me!