Woodmart pagespeed improves

Dear developers of Woodmart,

We are very happy with your theme (we have purchased it for 26 of our customers and have for now 23 websites already live with woodmart and three in building), and use it as the go-to theme for most of our webshops.
With Woodmart we have come a long way, including with the page speed optimizations that you have focussed with one of the previous updates.

We use WPRocket to further optimize the page speed of our webshops and we figured that using delayed execution of JavaScript really saves load time.
The way that delayed execution works, is that non-critical scripts are loaded only on user interaction (mouse move, click/touch, scroll/swipe, etc).

When applying this optimization, it is important to exclude certain scripts from being delayed – since those scripts are critical.
These are some scripts that are critical (for the menu to work instantly):
/woodmart/js/scripts/menu/mobileNavigation.js
/woodmart/js/scripts/menu/menuSetUp.js
/woodmart/js/scripts/menu/menuSetUp.js

The problem is, if we exclude these, then we also need to exclude:
/jquery-?[0-9.](.*)(.min|.slim|.slim.min)?.js
/jquery/ui/core.min.js
jquery-migrate.min.js

Then, it also needs:
/woodmart/js/scripts/global/helpers.js

All the scripts are too dependent on eachother, which makes it so that I need to exclude a lot of scripts, which makes the optimization way less useful.

Here is a more extreme example from one of our webshops that has the following list of JavaScript files (shipped by Woodmart) that include files that were either critical or are dependencies of critical files:
see this URL’s in the private content.

We are also convinced that the page speed would improve if you would use native JavaScript instead of jQuery.
Since jQuery adds a layer of cross-browser code on top of every jQuery method, this will make jQuery-powered code more resource-heavy.

We understand that jQuery improves the developer experience, but it hurts the user experience by affecting the page speed.

Our question is whether you would consider optimizing the JavaScript in a way that they are independent of eachother?

Hope you can help us that we can help each other making the theme very fast with a great score.

Best regards, Tim

Hello,

Thank you for contacting us. We are so happy that you use our theme for almost all of your projects.

Yes, you are right and we have plans to remove jQuery dependency one day. But since the WooCommerce plugin as well as other required plugins that will be used on your website in 99% of cases still need jQuery, there is sense to do this right now. At least WooCommerce should redesign their scripts, then we will do this in our theme as well.
As for the dependencies, don’t worry, a few scripts from your example will not cause a long delay in loading. Even with this list + jQuery, you can get a 90+ score on mobile devices. We have tested this already and you can read our article with results here https://space.xtemos.com/wordpress-performance-optimization-the-ultimate-guide-in-2021

Kind Regards

Thank you for your quick response.

We are happy to hear that you consider removing jQuery dependency one day when the time is right, and that you are seriously involved in optimizing for page speed.
Thank you for the article, we did not know that you have written an article dedicated to the Woodmart theme regarding page speed optimization.

We are planning to set up a test environment focused on optimizing page speed for webshops running the Woodmart theme, so that article will come to good use.

Best regards, Tim

Good luck with your optimization! We would be happy to hear about your results and experience. We are always struggling to optimize our theme even more. Slow theme is useless and we know that 🙂

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