TinyBit Critical CSS

Contributors: danielbachhuber, tinybit Tags: performance Requires at least: 4.5 Tested up to: 6.9 Requires PHP: 7.4 Stable tag: 0.2.2 License: GPLv2 or later License URI: https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-2.0.html

Generates and serves inline critical CSS.

Description

The TinyBit Critical CSS plugin works with tinybit-critical-css-server to generate and serve inline critical CSS.

Here's how the plugin works:

1. Critical CSS generation process is triggered by WP-CLI or the refresh webhook.
2. Plugin renders a given WordPress page. The HTML and CSS of the page are sent to tinybit-critical-css-server.
3. When tinybit-critical-css-server returns a successful response, plugin stores critical CSS to the filesystem.
4. If the critical CSS exists for a given request, the critical CSS is included inline and the stylesheet is deferred.

Et voila! You have inline critical CSS.

Installation

First, you'll need a working installation of tinybit-critical-css-server. Get that running if you haven't already.

Once the server is running, add a TINYBIT_CRITICAL_CSS_SERVER constant to your preferred location:

define( 'TINYBIT_CRITICAL_CSS_SERVER', 'http://localhost:8080' );

This constant tells the plugin where to send requests.

Next, filter tinybit_critical_css_pages to define the pages you'd like to generate critical CSS for:

add_filter(
    'tinybit_critical_css_pages',
    function() {
        return [
            home_url( '/' ) => [
                'handle'   => 'tinybit-style',
                'source'   => TINYBIT_ASSETS_DIR . '/dist/style.css',
                'critical' => TINYBIT_ASSETS_DIR . '/dist/critical/home.css',
                'when'     => function() {
                    return is_home();
                },
            ],
        ];
    }
);

In this particular example:

• handle is the name of the script handle (i.e. the first argument to wp_enqueue_script()).
• source is the file path of the source CSS file.
• critical is the file path where the critical CSS will be written.
• when is a callback for the context you'd like the critical CSS file to be used (so you can use it on more than one page).
• home_url( '/' ) is the page to be rendered and passed to the server as html.

Next, to generate critical CSS via WP-CLI, run:

wp tinybit-critical-css generate --url=https://tinybit.com/

If you'd like to regenerate critical CSS after each deploy, run wp tinybit-critical-css refresh-webhook to grab a webhook you can ping. Because the webhook queues a one-time cron job, we'd recommend using some alternate WP Cron system to avoid timeout issues.

Changelog

0.2.2

• Autoload critical CSS options to avoid persistent object cache notoptions race condition.

0.2.1

• Add option to store critical CSS in database vs filesystem.

0.2.0

• Remove unfortunate attempts at working around a deployment trigger issue. (0.1.2-0.1.6)

0.1.1

• Add filter to generated HTML for modification before critical CSS is determined.

0.1.0

• Initial release.