For example, are you using Contact Form 7 to add a form to your contact page? If you are, did you know that CF7 is adding JS and CSS to every page and not just your contact page? Consider the number of plugins you’re running and how many of them are doing the same thing as CF7. Caching and minifying assets that you aren’t using seems like a waste.

So what do we do about it? Well, you need to understand exactly what each plugin you’ve installed is repressible for. If it’s a slider or a contact form plugin, that’s pretty easy. You should be able to determine on a page by page basis (or even for a specific page template) whether or not we need to load assets for your slider/contact form plugin.

Then, we need to remove it. Sometimes this means manually dequeueing the script from your functions.php file (CF7 provides instructions on how to dequeue their JS and CSS), or digging into the settings of your plugin (some provide conditional loading settings), or using an asset manager plugin which provides a GUI for selecting scripts to dequeue based on the page you’re currently editing.

I run 2-3 WordPress optimization audits for clients every month, and this is always a huge step when caching and magnification just isn’t enough.