Last Updated on January 17, 2020 by Christopher G Mendla
While trying to optimize the CSS of a WordPress site using the Autoptimize plugin, it created extraneous bullets. The solution was simple.
I use the Sassy Social Share plugin to add social sharing buttons to my sites. Overall, it does a nice job. I am also using the Autoptimize plugin to speed up the response time for my sites. Optimizing a site is an iterative process.
When I applied the CSS optimization to one of my sites, it cause bullet artifacts to appear on the pages.
Some sleuthing with ‘inspect’ showed that the bullet points were a result of the Sassy Social Media plugin. Instead of rendering the sharing icons, it was rendering bullets.
Autoptimize allows you to exclude certain JavaScript or CSS from the optimization process. All I needed to do was add in the path to the exclusions,. Note that the exclusions are separated by commas.
Once that was added and saved, the extraneous bullets disappeared. That got my PageSpeed Insights score from about 30 to a little over 50. There is a long way to go but this was a significant start.
SUMMARY – Autoptimize and Sassy Social Share are excellent, useful plugins. Unfortunately there was a bit of a conflict. Inspect helped isolate the issue and the ability to add exclusions allowed me to resolve it.
Update Sept 12 2019 – I had another issue with a conflict between my Autoptimize settings where Gutenberg was not showing the category and tag tools when editing an existing post.