commonWP – WordPress Plugin Review – Discover the Advantage of jsDelivr

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commonWP is a wordpress plugin developed by Milan Dinić (who has created numerous plugins for wordpress).

commonWP Developer Milan Dinić

PS: The photo above is that of Milan Dinić..

This plugin enables the usage of jsDelivr CDN (free content delivery network sponsored by some big names in the industry like StackPath, Cloudflare, Fastly, Quantil etc.) for all the JavaScript and CSS files present in wordpress, provided that we are using the themes and plugins provided by (or hosted in) wordpress.org or Github. This is because changes were made in jsDelivr in 2017 to allow any file from GitHub and npm to be served by the CDN. (WordPress have most of the files in GitHub)

What I understand is that whenever someone loads our website, the plugin will check if the js and css files requested are availble in jsDelivr, then it will load it from there instead from our server. This makes websites fast – especially if it can load most files from jsDelivr.

The author is saying that the approach used in this plugin is safer then in any other plugin that enables usage of any CDN. First, commonWP will only rewrite file to point to one on jsDelivr if that remote file is identical to local one. Second, during comparison, it generates subresource identity hash of remote jsDelivr file and includes that hash in page’s source code so browser won’t load remote file if it doesn’t have exactly the same hash.

Changes that I made to go along with commonWP

To make the max files to be loaded from jsDelivr, I used only the free theme and plugins available in wordpress.org. Also I removed the child themes and any customization used in the child theme. By doing this, so far I am seeing remarkable speed improvements using this plugin in various sites. You can check out speed of this site here.

Also check the GTMetrix report here.

Advantages of commonWP

Its absolutely simple to use, just install the plugin and enable/activate it – thats all – nothing else to configure. After activation, it will fill up its cache in the background, and that may take some time depending on number of resources site uses.
Its lightweight and highly useful – Make your website load faster.
Its completely open source and the source code is available on GitHub
Its Free…

Disadvantages of commonWP

It may not work with other optimization plugins. There might be conflicts with them and it might not work as expected.

My Final Thoughts about commonWP

I hope that the developer continues to contribute to this plugin. This has a big future. So I am giving it a 5 star rating.

Please do check out my views about other wordpress plugins.

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