Kimcha

Makes sense. I totally understand that.

Thanks for taking the time to reply!

I just looked into your preload suggestion and that might be the perfect solution for me and perhaps the majority of your users.

It is already natively supported in Chrome and Chrome for Android, which is apparently 50% of global usage.

And for all other browsers there is a polyfill:
https://master-origin-loadcss.fgview.com/test/preload.html
https://brianflove.com/2016/07/21/preloading-with-critical-path-css/

My suggestion would be to allow users to select their most important CSS files that should be combined, minified and loaded in a blocking manner and then all the unimportant ones that should be combined, minified and loaded using the preload feature.

That would give users awesome performance and easy maintainability.

Thanks for the quick reply.

Frankly, I think chasing pagespeed insights scores is a little silly. I am much more interested in real life performance and easy maintainability than some scores– which is why I like your plugin.

After reading the github comments, I think the issue is simply a bug in pagespeed insights that wrongly shows stylesheets as blocking even though in real life they were not.

This means there is a substantial real life performance benefit, even if google insights doesn’t show it (but who cares…).

I have considered using one of the plugins that allow you to enter the critical css and require you to maintain it, but I think it is too much hassle and is too error prone for me and probably for most WP users.

But you don’t have to go all the way and remove ALL render blocking css to experience a substantial benefit.

A lot of sites have primary theme stylesheets that actually style the site and then several more for plugins, lightboxes and so on that are not required to display most of the page.

A feature that allows you to load those important css in a blocking manner and the unimportant ones async would be very valuable and take your plugin to the next level.

You could simply provide a text box where people enter the identifiers of the important CSS. Those get minified into a file that is load in normal, blocking manner and the rest of the css is minified and loaded using loadCSS().

Right now I have setup your plugin to only minify and combine JS files and I am using the “Async CSS” plugin to only load my theme’s css and bootstrap in a blocking manner.

The performance increase was substantial!

I appreciate the suggestion to inline all CSS, but even though that would give me a better pagespeed score, it would actually decrease real life performance for users and I don’t think that makes sense.