WP-Optimize Denies Allegations of Cheating Performance Tools
Yesterday, we published allegations from Gijo Varghese against UpdraftPlus, the makers of WP-Optimize. Varghese is founder of FlyingProxy, a competing company, and identifies himself as a “performance enthusiast.” He accused the plugin of “cheating Pagespeed and other tools” by hiding JavaScript files from loading when users test their sites through popular performance testing tools. The code uses an odd set of obfuscated names for the testing tools, which drew his suspicion. Varghese neglected to mention in his tweet that this is what happens when one of the plugin’s settings under Minify > JS is set to defer JavaScript. There are two radio button settings but they are confusing. The first radio button allows users to defer selected JavaScript files. It says the files will be loaded asynchronously (not the same as defer), and then it also says that users should select the first radio button if they want to exclude scripts from page speed tests. It is not clear how the scripts will be loaded for the user or for testing sites. Excluding is not the same as deferring, so in this case the settings UI is somewhat misleading and should be more clear. The second radio option is for…
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