Feature Request: Combine JS and CSS

[SJNBham]

Hi - We're trying to improve our admin page load times, especially when editing site pages. Currently, it looks like over 100 CSS and JS files are being loaded by the following two plugins when on an admin edit site page screen:

Kadence Blocks - PRO Extension (Version 2.7.3)
Kadence Blocks – Gutenberg Blocks for Page Builder Features (Version 3.5.3)

While the overall data transfer of these assets is minimal due to caching, the total number of requests seems to be slowing down page load times when combined with a bunch of other plugins (the number of requests becomes cumulative).

Here are some page load times (Finish/DOM/Load) before and after enabling the two plugins above. The page load time doubles or triples, and we only have a GeneratePress Theme and these two plugins enabled for testing:

Refreshing a page to edit

Before

3/2/2
3/1/1
3/1/1
3/1/1

After

5/3/3
6/4/4
6/4/4
9/6/6
8/4/4

This may not seem like a lot, but we're trying to get all of our plugins to be as efficient as possible. If each plugin adds a few seconds, it becomes a bad user experience for our site editors.

We've looked for plugins that will combine CSS and JS, but most/all we could find don't support that on the admin screens - only the public pages. It would be ideal if KadenceBlocks offered a setting that combined all the JS and CSS of whatever elements are enabled into a single JS and CSS file.

Thanks for considering this request ;)

[benjaminritner]

Hey! Thanks for commenting. Combining JS and CSS is not an optimization tactic anymore because of how browsers download files and sites are all using HTTP/2 https://gtmetrix.com/blog/should-i-combine-css-js-files-on-my-website/#should-i-combine-files

That said we are looking into some optimization techniques for the editor in Kadence Blocks 4.0

[SJNBham]

Thanks for the response, Ben! Glad to hear some additional performance tweaks may be coming down the pipe. We know HTTP2 doesn't limit in the same way as HTTP1 does. At the same time, it seems like some kind of queuing is going on. Maybe it's the combo of hundreds of JS and CSS files that is reaching a bottleneck. We've played around a little with serving the Kadence assets from browser memory vs. disk cache using a service worker, and that seemed to give a bit of a boost. But I think that memory is temporary and gets cleaned out fairly quickly, at least the way we're testing. We look forward to any performance improvements you can send our way. Have a great week!