Many different factors can affect your website’s loading speed. One of the most common is render-blocking resources.
In this edition of my website audit project, I go over what render-blocking resources are, how to fix them, and how I eliminated them from my site.
What are render-blocking resources?
In short render-blocking resources are scripts, stylesheets, and HTML imports that prevent the browser from rendering your page until they have been fully loaded and processed.
When a browser encounters a render-blocking resource, it will stop rendering the page until it is loaded.
This means that if you have a large CSS file or a JavaScript file that takes a long time to load, your website may appear to be slow or unresponsive to the user.
How to fix the issue.
To avoid this issue, it’s important to optimize your website’s resources and make sure that they are not blocking the rendering of your page.
This can involve techniques such as minifying and compressing your CSS and JavaScript files, using asynchronous loading for non-critical resources, and optimizing your images and other media files.
How I eliminated render-blocking resources on WordPress
While technical issues like these may seem complicated, if your website is built on WordPress, chances are there is a plugin to fix your problem.
Because I have a WordPress site, this solution works for me.
I used a handy plugin called Async JavaScript to get rid of resources slowing down my site. These are the settings I used.
After applying these changes my mobile loading score on PageSpeed Insights went from 58/100 to 75/100. A massive improvement!
Wrapping up.
Seeing as render-blocking resources are one of the biggest culprits when it comes to site speed, it’s worth spending some time fixing the issue.
The solution I used was the WordPress plugin, Async JavaScript, but I’m sure there are many different ways to solve the problem.
As a result, I saw a significant increase in my site’s health. This is a simple fix that anyone can do to improve their website in just a few minutes.If you enjoyed this edition of my website audit series, consider checking out another one of my projects: Mastering SEO in 30 Days.