This post is a follow up to the meetup on the 16th February 2022 “Performance: Improve your Core Web Vitals”.
Videos
The recording of the Zoom meeting is now published as two videos on the WP-Pompey YouTube channel and also in cwiccer.com: Videos and the original Meetup post
Plugin unloaders and loaders
There are a number of plugins that can be used to dynamically deactivate plugins on selected URLs. I’ve added a short list to cwiccer.com: Plugins used.
Regarding my oik-loader and oik-unloader plugins. I’m working on improvements to see if I can develop a block that will enable selection of plugins to dynamically activate/deactivate plugins from within the block editor. This block should hide the details of the actual implementation. See bobbingwide/oik-loader#14.
Server response and performance scores
I’m still collating figures to analyse the effect that over enthusiastic plugins have on performance scores. The slower the site the lower the score. But, if you have a good caching plugin you may not notice a reduction in performance score, even if one or two plugins deliver some CSS and/or JavaScript that’s not used. It appears that Lighthouse allows a little leeway when you’re already scoring in the 90’s.
That doesn’t mean to say I’m not going to want to shame some of the slower plugins. At the end of the day, if you really want to use a plugin you’ll have to find a way to deal with its idiosyncrases.