When you’re trying to squeeze every available bit of performance from your website, you’ve no doubt looked into caching.
When caching, most assets with a query string are not cached, so this will hamper your efforts and decrease performance.
What is a query string? A query string is the ?something=
parameter in the URL.
WordPress automatically adds version query strings to your CSS & JS assets when they are loaded.
If you look at your website source, you’ll see something like <link rel="stylesheet" src="https://domain.com/wp-content/themes/themename/style.css?ver=1.2.3" type="text/css" media="all" />
.
Notice the ?ver=123
, that’s the query string blocking your caching.
How do we do it?
Removing is relatively easy, let’s take a look. Simply add the following function to your functions.php
file.
<?php
if ( ! function_exists( 'uncoverwp_remove_query_strings' ) ) :
/**
* Remove query strings from
* assets for caching
*/
function uncoverwp_remove_query_strings( $src )
{
return remove_query_arg( 'ver', $src );
}
add_filter( 'script_loader_src', 'uncoverwp_remove_query_strings' );
add_filter( 'style_loader_src', 'uncoverwp_remove_query_strings' );
endif;
This simply adds our function to remove the query argument on the script and style loader tags, thus removing the query string from the assets URLs.
Conclusion.
A very easy way to boost your sites performance and allow full caching of assets.