What is Autoptimize in Wordpress

Autoptimize makes optimizing your site really easy. It can aggregate, minify and cache scripts and styles, injects CSS in the page head by default but can also inline critical CSS and defer the aggregated full CSS, moves and defers scripts to the footer and minifies HTML. You can optimize (and even convert to WebP) and lazy-load images, optimize Google Fonts, async non-aggregated JavaScript, remove WordPress core emoji cruft and more. As such it can improve your site’s performance even when already on HTTP/2! There is extensive API available to enable you to tailor Autoptimize to each and every site’s specific needs.

Minification, the process of removing unnecessary characters from source code (like whitespace and newline characters), is one way to improve page load times. Autoptimize helps with WordPress site optimization by minifying certain assets of your site, like CSS, HTML, and JavaScript files.

Simply install the plugin and then checkmark the boxes for the code you want to be minified. You can even add scripts for the code you don’t want to be compressed, as well as control whether or not you want the compressed files in the HTML code header or footer.