Giving visitors a great experience is the aim of every website. It’s incredibly important to keep the website going quickly. It is perfect for people with poor Internet access, and even most critically, it is one of the many aspects that decide the rankings of search engines.
WordPress helps you to create a personalized website with plug-in and theme options. Not all of these scripts load immediately and that stops the website to load faster. For several reasons, including caching, JavaScript rendering blocking, and CSS issues, your website may slow down. Fixing render-blocking JavaScript and CSS problems is quite easy using plugins in WordPress.
1. Using the Autoptimize Plugin
Autoptimize is explicitly designed to fix problems posed by suggestion platforms such as PageSpeed Insights. Autoptimize does all basic optimization tasks, such as minifying and caching. One interesting feature is that images can also be modified and translated to WebP format. This tool has excellent overall reviews, though you’ll want to keep in mind that configuring can be a bit complex. You can use this to fix JavaScript and CSS files which block rendering.
- You need the install Autoptimize plugin for that to go to Plugins and Add New and find Autoptimize and install.
- Now go to Settings and Check the boxes to get JavaScript and CSS optimized.
- Now click on the ‘Save changes and Empty Cache’ button at the end.
- Test your website with the Google Page Speed tool now. If there is still a question then press the Advanced Settings options.
- Now allow inline JS to be included in the plugin and remove scripts such as jquery.js.
- Scroll to the CSS option below and allow the plugin to mix CSS inline.
- To save your changes and empty the cache, click on the ‘Save changes and Empty Cache’ button at the end.
- Now go to the google page speed and check your website again.
2. Using the W3 Total Cache Plugin
W3 Total Cache is the next performance tool on the WP website. Thousands of web admins use this tool to make their websites more SEO-optimized and fast in performance, so you don’t have to worry about the efficacy of W3 Total Cache, especially when it’s optimized for progressive render.
What this plugin actually offers is to minify JavaScript files and the CSS that you select and propose. And though this plugin will take you more time to correct JS and CSS blocking render than the previous one.
- It is recommended for the users that already have a W3 Total Cache plugin on their website.
- You need to go to Performance then into General page Settings and scroll down the search for Minify.
- Primarily check the ‘Enable’ option next to Minify, and then select the ‘Manual’ option for minify mode. Save all the settings then save your settings.
- Google Page Speed Insights tool gives you the URLs of all the scripts and stylesheets you want to minify.
- You need to copy the URL of these scripts and paste in JS and CSS URLs. Option
- First, you have to scroll down to the JS section and then set the embed type to ‘Non-blocking async’ for the section under ‘Operations in Areas.’
- Now add the JS URLs you copied from the Google PageSpeed tool in provided space.
- Next, scroll down to the section on CSS and click the button ‘Add a stylesheet’ Now add CSS URLs from the Google PageSpeed tool that you copied to.
- Finally, to store your settings click on the ‘Save settings and purge cache’ button.
- Open the Google PageSpeed application and recheck the website
What Is Render-Blocking JavaScript and CSS?
Every WordPress site is made using various themes and plugins. These add lots of JavaScript and CSS files to the code. When a visitor lands on your website, their browser must first load the Javascript and CSS supporting files before loading the HTML. A webpage without a style sheet or a script looks ugly and useless. Now, if you have too many of those JS scripts that will slow the loading of the main HTML content. This slows down the website and, in effect. That means users are waiting to see sluggish connections on the website. Those scripts and stylesheets are called JavaScript and CSS render-blocking. If you need to score 100 on Google PageSpeed, you’ll need to fix this problem.
Why Are Render-Blocking Javascript and CSS Harmful to Your Website?
JavaScript and CSS scripts render-blocking bog down the web pages, which is poor for several reasons. Site speed is an important factor that determines Search Engine Optimisation (SEO). You are more likely to lose visitors when your site loads slowly, and less likely to be highly ranked in the search engine results.
Site speed is affected by many factors and one of these is render-blocking scripts. This is a factor that can make a considerable difference in load times. The fewer scripts your site has and the lighter, the better your site will be.
There are several speed-checking websites are there but Google Pagespeed Insights may be the most relevant. This test comes from Google itself and will show exactly where you can improve your site’s performance. You’ll see your WordPress Pagespeed score by placing your website URL in the search box on the Insight home page. This score is 1-100 on a scale but most websites are not going to reach 100. The most common advice given for improvement is to fix the JavaScript and CSS render-blocking.
If you want to improve your website’s performance then need to make the effort to make your website load faster. To help visitors load your page’s visible portion faster, you can postpone loading services that aren’t needed immediately. You can use plugins to solve the issues. The key principle behind addressing JavaScript and CSS module render-blocking is to minify such module files. You can manually minify JavaScript and CSS if you’re a developer. But if you’re a non-technical person, then there are loads of plugins to do such a job. We’ve shown you in this article how to easily fix render-blocking JavaScript and CSS in WordPress to improve your Google PageSpeed score.