I’ve been going bonkers lately trying to remove silly little query strings from static resources in WordPress. Though I tried changing various settings in W3 Total Cache; edited .htaccess and functions.php; purged the Minify and CDN cache completely; the error remained intact. People who know me, know that sometimes I can’t let a dead dog die; so I could not let the query string problem slide into an abyss either. It soon became a two week obsession. I absolutely detest myself when I get stuck in one of my obsessions…
Operating under limited hosting
Due to playing musical hosting services over an 18-month time frame – I no longer maintain a VPS (I currently host with a reseller account), so I am limited on how much back-end tweaking I can perform. It becomes frustrating at times, specifically when it involves files that I do not have access to anymore. Suffice it to say that due to financial constraints, I have been on a shoestring budget for the past year. So, when I find something (like a slick plug-in) that resolves an issue like this; I love to rave about a cool find.
How to remove query strings from static resources
I was stoked when I stumbled across this recently developed plug-in by Your WordPress Expert and was ecstatic to find such a quick and dirty. No more hair pulling or screaming at my reseller account! No more tweaking code with limited resources or breaking my site. I am ecstatic! Who would have thought that this one plug-in would make my day.
Plug-in Description: This plugin will remove any query strings from static resources like CSS & JS files, and will improve your speed scores in services like PageSpeed, YSlow, Pingdoom and GTmetrix.
Resources with a “?” or “&” in the URL are not cached by some proxy caching servers, and moving the query string and encode the parameters into the URL will increase your WordPress site performance grade significant.
Website Optimization
Though I do not pool all of my efforts into obtaining a perfect score, here are four sites that I frequently utilize to tweak my webs:
- GTMetrix – Uses Google Page Speed and Yahoo! YSlow.
- Pingdom – Plenty of performance-related statistics and you can trace your performance history.
- WebPageTest -Open-source project (supported by Google) and also includes test history.
- PageSpeed Insights – Google developers. Measures page performance for both mobile and desktop devices. A score of 85 or above is optimal.
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