The Clean Up WP Box contains a few simple options that turn on/off WordPress “features” most sites never use. Unfortunately, these unused items add unnecessary HTML and URL calls to every page of your site, and some even have associated (minor) security vulnerabilities.
If you don’t need to use these functions, it’s in your best interest to turn them off. WordPress doesn’t provide you with a simple way to do that, but the Clean Up WP Box for Thesis makes it easy.
After Installation…
After installing and activating the Clean Up WP Box, the included options will be set as follows:
- Emoji: Disabled
- Gutenberg Assets: Enabled
- oEmbed: Disabled
- XML-RPC: Enabled
- WP Rest API: Enabled
- WP Application Passwords: Disabled
- WP Sitemap: Enabled
If you want to change any of these settings, simply look for the Clean Up WP link in the Boxes dropdown menu in your Thesis Admin. On the resulting settings page, you can turn on/off each of these options as necessary.
Recommended: Disable Gutenberg Assets! This fat hunk ‘a junk adds over 33kB of CSS to every page of your site to support the Gutenberg Editor.
Emoji Character Support
Unfortunately, WordPress adds emoji character support in a pretty ham-fisted manner. Their solution involves placing inline JavaScript and CSS in the document <head> on every page of your site.
I understand why WordPress felt the need to implement the solution in this way, but the bottom line remains the same—it stinks.
Emoji support is now so widespread that this snippet of code no longer belongs in WordPress—and certainly not on every page of every WordPress site on Earth!
Disable this thing and Make Your Document <head> Great Again.
Gutenberg Assets
If you thought the 2.4kB of emoji support code was ludicrous, you ain’t seen nothin’ yet! The WP Block Library CSS—which only exists to support the Gutenberg Editor—adds a whopping 33kB of mostly-useless CSS to every page of your website.
But that’s not all! As of version 5.9, WordPress also serves two other large chunks of HTML markup that only apply to the Gutenberg Editor (but still increase the size of every page on your site).
From the perspective of performance and optimization, this is brutal. By disabling the Gutenberg Assets, you can recover that lost performance while keeping your site lean and mean.
oEmbed
This may be the dumbest, least justified thing WordPress has ever forced upon the masses. Whether you know it (or like it) or not, WordPress adds oEmbed support to your site via code injected into the document <head> on every page of your site.
Notice a trend here? WordPress has moved past asking you and is now deciding what is good and necessary for your site—even when it affects every page!
I happen to disagree with this approach, and that’s why the Clean Up WP Box exists. You should be the one to choose what gets added to your site (and I think you should be apprised of the costs and benefits, too).
We recommend you disable this option due to the performance benefits of doing so.
XML-RPC
The XML-RPC protocol allows websites (and other endpoints) to communicate with one another, even if they run on different platforms. This technology makes Trackbacks possible in WordPress.
WP Rest API
The WP Rest API is a powerful tool that some Plugins (or other 3rd party software) use to leverage certain WordPress features and functionality.
You will likely want to enable this functionality, but if you’re hardcore about performance and keeping your site’s code as clean as possible, you may wish to disable it.
WP Application Passwords
In version 5.6, WordPress introduced Application Passwords that are helpful when interacting with various WordPress APIs.
Most sites will never need this functionality, though, so it is turned off by default when you install the Clean Up WP Box.
WP Sitemap
In version 5.5, WordPress introduced a native sitemap feature that may interfere with any existing XML sitemap solutions on your site.
Of particular concern is the inclusion of a sitemap URL in your robots.txt file.
If you’re using a third party sitemap Plugin, the Plugin will automatically include a proper sitemap URL in your robots.txt file, thus rendering the WP sitemap URL redundant and potentially confusing to Google Search Console, Bing Webmaster Tools, etc.
To remove the WP sitemap URL from your robots.txt file and to avoid this potential confusion, simply un-check the sitemap option in the Clean Up WP Box.