WordPress Render Blocking

In a previous article, we took a look at what render blocking is and how you could fix it. When it comes to WordPress websites, there are some additional areas that could be causing render blocking issues. In this article we’ll look at render blocking from a WordPress perspective and find out how you can both resolve and monitor this moving forward.

How to identify render blocking resources on your WordPress site

The ways to identify render blocking are the same for all websites, including WordPress. You can benefit from using tools like WebPageTest, Google PageSpeed Insights, or GTmetrix that will make suggestions for improving performance and point out any resources that slow down rendering.

Chrome DevTools will let you inspect the source code of your webpage, view the network requests made by the page, and see the performance of your website. 

The culprits behind render blocking on a WordPress website

The meaning of “render blocking” applies to a WordPress website as it does to any other website. Everything that is included in the section of an HTML page, like CSS stylesheets, JavaScript files, fonts, or external file imports, is considered to be “render blocking.”

Let’s look at a few render blocking issues as they particularly apply to WordPress websites:

Unoptimized themes and plugins

When running a WordPress website, if the theme or plugins you are using are not optimized for performance, it can cause resources such as JavaScript and CSS files to block the rendering of the webpage until they are fully loaded. These third-party scripts and widgets that are added to a page through plugins or other means prevent the page from being fully shown to the user until they have finished loading.

It’s possible that certain WordPress plugins and themes will add a significant amount of code to a web page, which may result in render blocking. This can be frustrating for users and, as we said, impact the overall performance and usability of the site.

Large, unoptimized images

Using large images on your website can cause render blocking issues, as the browser has to load these images before it can display the rest of the page.

To stop this from happening, you should optimize your images by making them smaller and saving them in the right format.

CSS and JS files

Large CSS and JavaScript files are one of the main causes of render blocking in WordPress. If a web page has a lot of CSS and JavaScript code, it can take a long time to load and can block the rendering of the page.

Poor server performance

It is possible for your website to experience “render blocking” if your server is unable to keep up with the demands imposed by your website. This may be due to a number of different factors.

A very common one is insufficient resources. If it does not have enough memory, CPU, or other resources, it may struggle to process the requests made by your website and lead to slow load times.

When your server receives too many requests or runs too many processes, it can cause load times to slow down and render blocking issues.

Traffic

If your website gets a lot of visitors all of a sudden, your server may get overloaded. This can cause your website to load slowly and cause problems with rendering.

How to Fix Render-Blocking on a WordPress Website

Web developers can use a variety of methods to reduce or get rid of render blocking, which will improve the speed and performance of their websites in the long run.

Use a plugin

There are many WordPress plugins, like Autoptimize, WP-Rocket and WP-Optimize, that can help you minify your code and load your site’s resources as quickly as possible.

These plugins can be very helpful on this topic by providing practices like delaying JavaScript execution, removing unused CSS, and LazyLoading within minutes of configuration.

They can also help with caching, unless you host your website with a sophisticated provider that has its own caching mechanism, as we do at Pressidium.

Optimize your themes and plugins

To fix render blocking issues in WordPress, you may need to optimize your themes and plugins, improve your server performance, and optimize your images. You might also want to think about using a caching plugin, which can help your server handle less work and make your website run better.

Manually minify your code

You can also manually minify your code by removing unnecessary characters (such as white space and comments) from your CSS and JS files. This can be a time-consuming process, but some online tools like Minifier or CSS Minify or Minify JavaScript will make the work much easier for you.

Import files in the proper way

There are practices that can help you import files in a way that will reduce their loading time.

You can use async and defer attributes, or inline critical CSS like we discussed in the first render blocking article or decide what resources that are not critical to the initial rendering of the page and load them after by using JavaScript.

Online resources to help fix

If you are running a WordPress site and are experiencing render blocking issues, you can use the WordPress Codex in addition to the tools we discussed in the previous article. A resource for WordPress developers online is the WordPress Codex. It contains details on how to enhance the functionality of your website, such as how to lessen render blocking by providing guides on how to optimize the code or themes and plugins as well as all the other practices we mentioned before.

Conclusion

Render blocking can have a significant impact on the performance of a WordPress website. To reduce render blocking, it is important to identify the resources that are causing the issue and follow the techniques and practices we discussed above.