A quick rundown of the asset organizer plugins I’ve tried for WordPress.
I’ve had a ton of sites that were loading slow because of unnecessary plugins loading on certain pages. Normally, this wouldn’t matter so much as you can always cache the page but in these instances, the pages weren’t cacheable. I wanted to prevent them from loading to speed up the site so I went around trying different plugins.
Here are my quick rundowns on:
- WP Gonzales (paid)
- Plugin Organizer (free)
- Plugin Load Filter (free)
- Plugin Logic (free)
- WP Asset CleanUp (free)
- WordPress Assets Manager (free)
- Clearfy – WordPress optimization plugin
Plugin Organizer review
- WP Gonzales (paid) – probably the best one. Organizes things by CSS and JS load rather than by plugin. This is probably more work to manage but at the same time more granular control.
- Plugin Organizer – outdated UI and a little clumsy to work with (you’ll keep forgetting which rules should be enabled or disabled)…but it works fantastic. And the 2nd or 3rd least impact on speed. This one is great if you have many different rules for different post types.
- Plugin Load Filter – best-designed interface and minimal speed impact. It’s a great solution for simple logic (disabling a few plugins here and there). But gets difficult to manage if you need to alter it from many pages. In that case, Plugin Organizer is better due to its grouping arrangement. Plugin Load Filter sometimes doesn’t work when you have dozens of conditional rules going back and forth.
- Plugin Logic – too raw…great for quick and easy manual organization, but not robust enough for many pages
- WP Asset CleanUp – I think this is a good one. It’s among the best of this niche. I only hate that it too has a lot of autoloads. It’s not uncommon for this plugin to have 500kb of autoloads…which is wayyyy too much.
- Clearfy Optimization Plugin – does more than just plugin organizer. I think it’s overkill.
- WordPress Assets Manager (Webcraftic) – slows your site and doesn’t quite work right. They claimed to have copied the best features from Clearfy, Asset Queue Manager, and other optimization plugins. Also ripped off many elements from Gonzales plugin. I hated it.
Things to think about
Common speed tactics
- Just speeding up your homepage? Try disabling all unnecessary plugins from loading on it…contact forms, WooCommerce, etc.
- Speeding up your WooCommerce store pages? Try disabling pagebuilders, contact forms, etc.
Management via plugin vs CSS/JS
- Managing by plugin is easier and less time but managing by CSS/JS gives you more control…sometimes you only want to block a certain asset, not the entire plugin itself.
Simple rules or complicated
- Just need to disable a few plugins on a few pages? (Speed gains.)
- Need to disable various plugins on various pages? (Conflict resolution.)
- Try different ones to see what fits your site best.
Hello you could do a plugin analysis https://wordpress.org/plugins/clearfy/#developers
I didn’t like it. Just slows down my site!
Fact ?
Try it for yourself and you’ll know right away!
Hi,
I’m a bit confused. It seems that the WebCraftic plugin (your last choice) is calling itself Gonzales in the WordPress repository.
https://wordpress.org/plugins/gonzales/
Is this the same plugin or are they two different things?
2 different plugins and I think it’s so shady on their part for doing that. The WebCraftic one is definitely NOT WordPress Gonzales plugin https://tomasz-dobrzynski.com/wordpress-gonzales
Thanks Johnny for the comparison. Would you recommend any of these plugins to use together with swift performance?
You don’t need any of them. 😉
Hi Johnny, I used Plugin Organizer for a number of years on a couple of sites. It did the job, but it is too easy to get lost.
I thought Plugin Load Filter could be the answer, but I nearly missed how it broke things Gravity forms appeared to work, but stopped sending emails (via Mailgun) and the Woocommerce ajax “add to cart” broke on archive pages (at least with the Astra themes WooCommerce addon).
The author can’t really answer much in English and says he has not used WooCommerce.
Hahaha yeah, plugin organizers are still a mess for the most part. They either do too much, or too complicated, or slow down the site more than they actually save in asset load.
Embarrassing, but it seems my Gravity forms issue was of my own making! My Mailgun plugin was set to admin side only. No issue for other WP notifications, but it broke Gravity Forms. WooCommerce shop page Ajax remains an issue, but fin with Ajax off.
With Plugin Organizer I hit an issue with SEOPress and WooCommerce (but no other SEO plugin).
Ahhh yes, those plugin organizers can be quite tricky if you’re not sure what you’re deactivating. WC does use ajax for certain cart count and other functions so yeah, have to be careful on that.
I used WebCraftic on a membership style website with over 20,000 users and posts related to them. The issue with WebCraftic is that it stores the data in the wp_options table causing the website to slow down and create 502 errors. I honestly forgot the size it reached, but this is the row you would look for with an estimated size:
LENGTH(option_value) | option_name
681241 | wbcr_clearfy_assets_manager_options
Not that it is the only plugin that can do this. On another site I use Thrive Leads and if you track the clicks it also loads a bunch of data:
49909 | tve_leads_saved_tpl_meta
Just letting you know that if you have a large site take into consideration the load.
Yeaup! That’s why I always clean autoloads and avoid plugins that add tons of autoloads.
your opinion about Perfmatters?
I love Brian Jackson and all his work…but Perfmatters is unnecessary for me. Many of its features are not necessary and/or can be done through cache plugin already.
How would Flying Scripts fit into this scenario using Swiftperformance Pro?
Have you looked at delaying scripts vs not enabling them?
I ask because I want to streamline all the analytics stuff now that I have to add a facebook conversion API plugin on top of the pixel code.
I seriously only need good analytics on the Woocommerce side but that’s also the relevant content for SEO.