Since 2015, the WordPress development teams have settled into a disturbing pattern of adding “stuff” to your site’s HTML output without giving you a choice about whether or not you want or need it.
In some cases, these items can add nearly 2kb of code to every page of your site!
We now live in an era where performance is paramount, especially on mobile devices where connections are slower and attention spans are shorter. On top of that, search engines like Google preach speed and optimization above all else, and this means you need to be vigilant about keeping your site fast and fresh.
Given this reality, it seems odd that WordPress—the most widely-used platform for building and running websites—is so blasĂ© about adding cruft to your site without your permission. Worse, WordPress fails to provide you with an easy way to get rid of the stuff you don’t need!
Look at This Mess!
Over the past two years, WordPress has added 3 things to your document <head>, and you probably weren’t even aware of them:
- Emoji character support
- oEmbed support
- WP Rest API support
Because of the sheer amount of code added to each page of your site, emoji character support ranks as the worst offender here. And given how few people would ever use it, oEmbed support ranks as the most ridiculous. As for WP Rest API support…well, this one is actually pretty useful for Plugins, apps, and extended functionality.
Now, prepare yourself for a truly revolutionary approach to this problem…
Instead of just letting WordPress heap this stuff upon your site, it would be better if you could simply select what you want to run and omit what you don’t!
Shocking, I know. Take a deep breath, and then read on.
Let’s Clean Up the Mess
Cleaning up the cruft is easy with this new and free Clean Up WP Box from DIYthemes.
After installing and activating this Box, the default settings will have your site performing in a DIYthemes-approved manner. Of course, you can always visit the Clean Up WP settings page to tweak these options to your liking.
