Maximizing Front-End Speed While Using Squirrly SEO

The SEO Plugin by Squirrly SEO is a commonly used SEO plugin for WordPress sites. At the time this article was written, it had over 100,000 active installations.

If you notice that the Squirrly SEO plugin adds additional assets that load on the front of the site when testing in GTmetrix or WebPageTest, the plugin provides some advanced settings that can be used to reduce those from loading.

You may need to change to SEO expert. You may be in SEO beginner mode to see the plugin’s advanced settings in wp-admin. The change should be very fast to see the advanced settings in the plugin settings after the SEO expert change.

From within wp-admin, go to this menu item;

Squirrly SEO > SEO Configuration > Tweaks & Sitemaps > Advanced Settings

– Disable Load SEO Snippet in Frontend

– Disable Load Squirrly Frontend CSS

– Enable Minify Squirrly SEO Metas

– Enable Load Squirrly SEO Late Buffer

It is worth checking that those advanced setting changes do not impact how the site is working and that the SEO plugin is still working as expected.

Retest the site using GTmetrix or WebPageTest to confirm that the Squirrly SEO plugin is no longer loading the additional front-end assets on your site.

It is always worth trying to keep front-end assets down and the number of requests on load from active plugins down since this will help improve your site’s front-end performance for visitors. It is also handy to find out if the active plugins being used have their own optimization options without having to fall back on a plugin such as Asset CleanUp to control which plugin assets are loaded on all pages of the site.

Useful Links

https://wordpress.org/support/topic/last-update-created-unnecessary-css-slowing-down-site