Thanks, I had my site backed up and so restored it,
just disabling AO (and purging page cache if any) would have been easier, AO does not change the original CSS/JS, it just swaps it on the fly in the HTML for the optimized one.
The first message (from PageSpeed-Try to defer or asynchronously load blocking resources, or inline the critical portions of those resources directly in the HTML) is just a suggestion to place more of your content above the fold
that’s correct
but that is not crucial and not possible in these kind of sites.
that would surprise me, really
Your speed or SEO will not be affected.
this is not entirely correct I’m afraid; download & render speed can improve dramatically with a JS/CSS optimizing plugin.
You can try to optimize CSS delivery by using a caching plugin, it may give you better results.”
a caching plugin (hypercache or wp super cache) is the first thing to do to improve performance, so do install, but it will never optimize your CSS delivery (except for those caching plugins that like AO offer CSS minification functionality).
Maybe that is why my desktop speed dropped 20 points and my mobile site broke?
pagespeed insights speed dropping can have a lot of reasons (should see the recommendations listed really), but most important reason would be the “server response time” which can increase when using AO without a page caching plugin (which is the first thing to install to improve performance).
your mobile site breaking: likely to be some JS that needs to be excluded, but I’d have to see your site to determine that.
frank