Optimization Plugins/Services- What You Should Know

Optimization Plugins/Services are a great investment in your site's growth.  They can help your site load more efficiently, improving your Core Web Vitals and keep people on your site longer.

Benefits

An optimization plugin can come with a lot of features. Things like:

• image compression / optimization - the plugin will go through your gallery to resize ads so that you aren't resizing them on the page.  Some can even serve it in formats that are meant just for the web.
• minifying scripts / CSS - this has the plugin do things like remove extra characters or paragraph breaks in order to reduce the size of files.
• combining scripts / CSS - this smashes your scripts and CSS into one large file to try to improve load times
• lazy loading - this takes your page load and loads it piece by piece, so that you don't have to wait for the full page to load
• deferred loading - this will wait to load your content until either so many seconds pass or if someone takes action on the page

These will help speed up your page's response time by cutting down on the number of scripts to load, the size of images, breaking down everything into smaller pieces.

Things you should know

• Most optimization plugins have free versions with a few features available.  Investing in one is a good idea - and you should look for one that can do more than one thing.
• Make sure that the optimization plugin lets you exclude code.  Why?  You can actually break scripts on your page.  (It's true: because SHE Media has built in optimizations, we don't recommend that you optimize our plugins.  If you exclude both header.js and blogherads.js, it should let us do our thing, and optimize everything else)
• If you aren't on Wordpress, you do have options, too!  Squarespace does have some plugins that are for optimization as well (and they're some of the same big names as you see on Wordpress - Smush, Autoptimize)
• Not all services play well with our scripts. Autoptimize, Perfmatters and Siteground Optimize can all break our code if you aren't careful.
• Sometimes selective every optimization request can slow down your site (for the same reason we ask you exclude ours - a lot of scripts have their own optimization settings built in).  So take your time and figure out what scripts you want to optimize and how.  It might be that you can combine CSS, but not your scripts.