Critical CSS

Hi karenratte;
First things first; CCSS will not help cutting bandwidth down; the (only) goal of it is ensuring the page can be rendered (a) without having to wait for the full CSS to be downloaded and (b) without the full CSS being render-blocking.

Now given the fact that the HTML of the homepage does not have any reference to Autoptimize in it, but when adding a random parameter to the homepage URL it does, it seems you’ll need to clear the page cache(s) at WP Engine?

frank

Thank you Frank. I thought that Autoptimize took care of that with the API activation. I did not find explicit instructions. I will search again.

No, Autoptimize indeed does not do page caching. Check with WP Engine support maybe, they’re great ??

My question was about Critical CSS and get it working. If I can’t figure it out, I will get a refund. I assumed with the API that Autoptimize did the rest.

• This reply was modified 3 years, 3 months ago by karenratte.

well, the thing is that critical CSS was (likely) not working due to page caching “hiding” the critical CSS ?? have you been able to get the page cache purged already?

I have purged all caches from WP Engine. Still nothing. Do I need to contact Critical CSS?

OK, the good news; critical CSS is now used on the homepage, so we are (slowly) advancing. Do you still see only one rule (for “is_front_page”), or are there more? Are there any jobs in the job queue?

frank

No, this is the only Rule and no queues. I opened this rule. So, Now it is Manual. Nothing else. No rules, no queues. Thanks
Karen

OK, so the problem seems to be no jobs are added to the queue (and if there are no jobs, there indeed can be no new rules either).

Can you

1. make sure “Enable configuration per post/ page?” is active
2. edit a random page
3. in the “autoptimize metabox” click on “generate critical CSS”
4. do this for 2 more pages
5. go to settings -> autoptimize -> critical CSS and check if anything is in the queue now

frank

HI Frank,
I added the front page using the “Generate critical CSS” on the front page. It added it to the queue.
I edited two more pages, set it to generate and it added them to the queue.
So, when I make a change, I add it to the queue.

Should a visited page also get added or do I add them all manually? I guess I am missing some pertinent info here. Can you point me to the proper basic how-to? I may have errantly assumed it was automatic. In the meantime, I will see what further docs I can find.
Thank you for your help.

_normally_ visited pages (for requests from non-logged anonymous users) should get added to the queue, so all would be fully automatic yes, but as a work-around you could indeed add more pages to the queue manually and you should see rules being that way.

to be able to see what is (not) happening with jobs (not) being queued, can you enable “debug logging” under settings -> autoptimize -> critical css -> advanced options?