There’s a lot of things that WordPress can do, but there’s also a lot that it doesn’t do out of the box. The more scripts and styles you add, the slower your site gets. Just a little each time, but it does add up.

That’s where Autoptimize comes in. Autoptimize combines all those JS and CSS files together and minifies them. It also minifies the HTML. This can greatly speed up your site.

One of the great things about Autoptimize is that it’s a simple plugin. There are three checkboxes, one for CSS, one for JavaScript, and one for HTML.

If you want, you can also click the advanced button and get some more options. This is really helpful when one script, for whatever reason, doesn’t work well with Autoptimize. You can exclude that one file.

What ends up happening is 12 JavaScript files become 1 and 8 style sheets become 1. Plus everything is minified. This can be a nice performance boost.

Autoptimize is free, so you’ve got nothing to loose.