Got a call from a client last week. They were pulling their hair out. They had a solid site on a good server, not overloaded with plugins, but their Google PageSpeed score was just… stuck. Hovering in the low 80s. The main complaint from Google? “Eliminate render-blocking resources.” It’s a classic WordPress frontend performance issue, and they’d already tried two different caching plugins. No dice.
The thing is, they weren’t wrong. For years, WordPress has been a bit aggressive with how it loads scripts and styles. It just throws a bunch of stuff into the <head> of the page, and the browser has to stop everything to download and process it all before it can even show the user a single pixel. Total bottleneck.
The Old Fix Was a Maintenance Nightmare
Now, my first thought a few years back would’ve been to reach for a plugin like Asset CleanUp or manually write a bunch of wp_dequeue_script functions. And yeah, that works. For a day. Then the client installs a new plugin, or a theme updates, and suddenly the whole fragile system breaks. You end up playing whack-a-mole with script handles. Trust me on this, it’s a total nightmare to maintain long-term.
But here’s the kicker: WordPress 6.9 fundamentally changes the game. The core team has been shipping major performance updates, and this latest release gives us the tools to fix this the *right* way, without the hacks. The official WordPress Core team published an incredibly dense field guide on these changes, and it’s gold if you’re a dev. One of the biggest deals is the new ability to control script priority directly.
Instead of just letting the browser guess, we can now tell it, “Hey, this script for the fancy image carousel isn’t critical. Load the important stuff first.” We do this using a new fetchpriority argument right when we enqueue the script.
wp_enqueue_script(
'my-non-critical-script',
plugins_url( 'foo.js', __FILE__ ),
array(),
'1.0',
array(
'strategy' => 'defer',
'fetchpriority' => 'low',
)
);So, What’s the Point?
Just updating to WordPress 6.9 won’t magically fix your site. The real benefit comes from using themes and plugins whose developers have actually adopted these modern standards. An old, clunky theme is still going to load clunky, render-blocking assets. That’s the conversation I had with my client.
- Your theme matters more than ever. A modern block theme or a well-coded classic theme will leverage these new tools. An old one from 2018 won’t.
- It’s about prioritization. We can now ensure that critical resources for the user experience (like the main hero image) are loaded first, while deferring non-essential scripts.
- This isn’t a one-time fix. It’s about building with a performance-first mindset, using the tools WordPress core provides.
Look, this stuff gets complicated fast. If you’re tired of debugging someone else’s mess and just want your site to work, drop my team a line. We’ve probably seen it before.
The bottom line? Stop fighting the WordPress asset loader with hacks. The tools are finally in Core. You just have to use them.
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