[Request] Remove jQuery dependency

Hello,

My name is Charlie, Ecwid by Lightspeed Customer Care team.

First off, we really enjoy the plugin! 

Glad to hear it!

When we activated it, we noticed that it enqueues jQuery. It would be lovely if the Ecwid team could work on removing the jQuery dependency as more and more themes/developers are moving towards either lighter libraries or vanilla js.

Thank you for your question! Let me answer it head-on first: at this moment we do not plan to move away from using jQuery. Would it be possible in the future? Sure!

Right now, jQuery is a very common library that comes out of the box with WordPress core itself, which WordPress allows and sometimes even points to as something that developers can use. Our plugin is used in tens of thousands of WordPress websites and there is a point in not bringing an extra library to all those websites when we can use something that is already there.

I assume you are worried about website performance, so I’ve consulted our dev team on that, and, on top of everything I said above, they also want to stress that we use jQuery for only a relatively small number of auxiliary functions within the code so it should not affect performance.

While this is our stance now, it doesn’t mean it won’t change in the future. We will continue to monitor the changes and keep our hand on the pulse of how WordPress evolves so we can always be at the ready if needs be.

Thank you, and if you have any other questions or want to report something specific regarding jQuery and your website performance, please send us an email if the details you want to share are private. Our support email is [email protected]

Thank you and have a good weekend!

• This reply was modified 1 year, 6 months ago by Charlie from Ecwid by Lightspeed.

Thank you for your reply! You are correct in that this is directly related to performance and I totally understand that this would not be a quick switch and that it would take quite a bit of testing to ensure that existing websites do not break due to the update.

For the time being, I have added some PHP to my functions.php to remove the scripts when not on the store page, here is the gist if anyone would like to do the same. Please note that adding this snipped will disable the shopping cart icon on all pages and may not be compatible with future Ecwid updates, use at your own risk.