PageSpeed: Optimize the order of styles and scripts (deprecated)
Recommendations
- Lighthouse
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- Metrics
- Audits
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- Allow back/forward cache restoration
- Avoid an excessive DOM size
- Avoid chaining critical requests
- Avoid CSS @import
- Avoid document.write()
- Avoid enormous network payloads
- Avoid large layout shifts
- Avoid long main-thread tasks
- Avoid multiple page redirects
- Avoid non-composited animations
- Avoid serving legacy JavaScript to modern browsers
- Avoid unload event listeners (Deprecated)
- Combine images using CSS sprites
- Defer offscreen images
- Don't lazy load Largest Contentful Paint image
- Efficiently encode images
- Eliminate render-blocking resources
- Enable Keep-Alive
- Enable text compression
- Ensure text remains visible during webfont load
- Keep request counts low and transfer sizes small
- Lazy load third-party resources with facades
- Minify CSS
- Minify JavaScript
- Minimize main-thread work
- Preconnect to required origins
- Preload key requests
- Preload Largest Contentful Paint image
- Properly size images
- Reduce initial server response time
- Reduce JavaScript execution time
- Reduce the impact of third-party code
- Reduce unused CSS
- Reduce unused JavaScript
- Remove duplicate modules in JavaScript bundles
- Replace large JavaScript libraries with smaller alternatives (deprecated)
- Serve images in next-gen formats
- Serve static assets with an efficient cache policy
- Use a <meta name="viewport"> tag with width or initial-scale
- Use a Content Delivery Network (CDN)
- Use explicit width and height on image elements
- Use HTTP/2 for all resources
- Use passive listeners to improve scrolling performance
- Use video formats for animated content
- User Timing marks and measures
- PageSpeed (Legacy)
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- Avoid a character set in the meta tag
- Avoid bad requests
- Avoid CSS @import
- Avoid CSS expressions (deprecated)
- Avoid document.write (deprecated)
- Avoid Flash on mobile webpages (deprecated)
- Avoid landing page redirects
- Avoid Plugins (deprecated)
- Combine external CSS (deprecated)
- Combine external JavaScript (deprecated)
- Combine images using CSS sprites
- Defer loading of JavaScript (deprecated)
- Defer parsing of JavaScript
- Enable compression
- Enable Keep-Alive
- Improve server response time (deprecated)
- Inline small CSS
- Inline small JavaScript
- Leverage browser caching
- Leverage proxy caching (deprecated)
- Make landing page redirects cacheable (deprecated)
- Minify CSS
- Minify HTML (deprecated)
- Minify JavaScript
- Minimize cookie size (deprecated)
- Minimize DNS lookups (deprecated)
- Minimize redirects
- Minimize request size
- Optimize images
- Optimize the order of styles and scripts (deprecated)
- Parallelize downloads across hostnames (deprecated)
- Prefer asynchronous resources
- Put CSS in the document head
- Remove query strings from static resources (deprecated)
- Remove unused CSS (deprecated)
- Serve resources from a consistent URL
- Serve scaled images
- Serve static content from a cookieless domain (deprecated)
- Specify a cache validator
- Specify a character set early
- Specify a Vary: Accept-Encoding header (deprecated)
- Specify a viewport for mobile browsers (deprecated)
- Specify image dimensions
- Use an application cache (deprecated)
- Use efficient CSS selectors (deprecated)
- YSlow (Legacy)
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- Add Expires headers
- Avoid AlphaImageLoader filter
- Avoid CSS expressions
- Avoid empty src or href
- Avoid HTTP 404 (Not Found) error
- Avoid URL redirects
- Compress components
- Configure entity tags (ETags)
- Do not scale images in HTML
- Make AJAX cacheable
- Make favicon small and cacheable
- Make fewer HTTP requests
- Make JavaScript and CSS external
- Minify JavaScript and CSS
- Put CSS at the top
- Put JavaScript at bottom
- Reduce cookie size
- Reduce DNS lookups
- Reduce the number of DOM elements
- Remove duplicate JavaScript and CSS
- Use a Content Delivery Network (CDN)
- Use cookie-free domains
- Use GET for AJAX requests
Overview
Correctly ordering external stylesheets and external and inline scripts enables better parallelization of downloads and speeds up browser rendering time.
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Details from Google
Because JavaScript code can alter the content and layout of a web page, the browser delays rendering any content that follows a script tag until that script has been downloaded, parsed and executed. However, more importantly for round-trip times, many browsers block the downloading of resources referenced in the document after scripts until those scripts are downloaded and executed. On the other hand, if other files are already in the process of being downloaded when a JS file is referenced, the JS file is downloaded in parallel with them.
Summary
CSS/JSHigh
Moderate
PageSpeed recommends:
Put external scripts after external stylesheets if possible
Browsers execute stylesheets and scripts in the order in which they appear in the document. If the JS code has no dependencies on the CSS files, you can move the CSS files before the JS files. If the JS code does depend on the CSS contained in an external file - for example, styles that are needed for output you are writing to the document in the JS code - this isn't possible.
Put inline scripts after other resources if possible
Putting inline scripts after all other resources prevents blocking of other downloads, and it also enables progressive rendering. However, if those "other resources" are external JS files on which the inline scripts depend, this might not be possible. In this case, it's best to move the inline scripts before the CSS files.