Is the Async JavaScript plugin redundant, even harmful?

Bergeron

I currently have pretty much every selection chosen on my Leap settings, however within the past week or two I have noticed some fluctuations in my cache rate and the past couple days it has plunged into the mid 50s. I was up until a couple minutes ago running the Async JavaScript wordpress plugin on my site. However, I have been running it for a few months. Would this plugin be considered a redundancy that is actually doing more harm than good? Would this be conflicting with any cache settings? I am not exactly a techie…and I haven't been doing anything differently recently to my site. However, I have been publishing posts at around 1 or 2 per day since January, and that seems to be (based on the 28 day average) when things started to decline.

I am in the green for mobile, and used to be in the green, now in the orange for desktop.

APerez

Bergeron From what I am seeing from past questions about Async JavaScript, it's actually not necessary to have it since our own script delay system pretty much makes it pointless. And there seems to be a high probably for it to conflict with scripts loaded asynchronously. So yes, it's was the right move to uninstall it as far as I can tell.

In terms of caching, it doesn't appear you have any 3rd party caching plugins installed so there shouldn't be any worries with caching sitting in front of our own caching. Your cache hit rate is currently sitting at a high enough percentage, so that's alright as well.

I would suggest try clicking on the yellow LCP section that's showing on the Leap page, and this will take you to the LCP section and list out some pages of areas where Leap is flagging things that are causing the score to lower. You can click on Test in Ezoic Lab on the right-hand side of each line which will then show you exactly what it was that's being flagged. Alternatively, if you have the Ezoic Chrome extension installed, you can also use that on pages and find out in the Leap tab of the extension to highlight the areas that are causing issues.

Bergeron

APerez Thank you very much, I will keep the Async JavaScript disabled.

However I am still slightly concerned with a cache rate falling close to 40% over ten days and now seeing my cache miss rate starting to spike. I have seen my cache rate fall if I use AutoOptimize to compress some images and purge post revisions which only gets turned on for about 10 minutes and then gets disabled again. But that dip only lasts for a day and bounces back. This seems to be a more longterm decline. I will try the Chrome extension route and see if I can figure something out.

APerez

Bergeron Where are you seeing the cache hit rate being at 40%? The Leap dashboard shows that cache hit rate sitting at a very good rating of 86.5% at the moment.

Bergeron

The daily cache hit rate for the last 30 days, it plummeted last week from the high 90s to the high 40s, but then increased back to its previous rate in the 90s and has seemed to stabilize.

Heather

Bergeron Hello Heather here I hope you are well. Please can you confirm if you have the Ezoic CDN manager set up on your site which automatically clears the cache for you? This article talks you through it in more detail: https://support.ezoic.com/kb/article/how-can-i-set-up-the-ezoic-wordpress-plugin-for-cdn-management? many thanks

Bergeron

Heather I have it set up, never turned it off.

JeanPierre

Bergeron The cache should be stable now. This issue looks like it was caused by some external system on the site. This could have been an update from your host for site functions or just some headers sent from your host or a plugin that interrupted caching for a moment. Not to worry, everything seems to be correct now.