from autoptimize’s point of view using plugin organizer can be very beneficial but also very detrimental depending on your P-O settings.
If you do fine-grained exclusions of a lot of plugins on all pages, then you will end up with a different set of CSS/ JS on each page, resulting in AO to create new optimized CSS/ JS for each, which has a negative perf. impact.
If on the other hand you use P-O to stop a plugin from injecting it’s JS on all but one page, the result will be positive as the AO’ed JS for all but one page will be the same and will be smaller.
The challenge -as often- is in striking the correct balance 🙂
frank (ao dev)
It’s exactly as Frank says. They can work together but they can also cause each other problems. It depends on how you set them up. You’ve got to have a really good grasp of what you are doing. Creating a lot of plugin filters and specializing the Plugin List for every page will nullify the use of a caching plugin. Because it won’t ever be able to cache the parts of the page that don’t change from page to page since they will always be changing.
Thank you for the replies. From the the way it seems now, Plugin Organizer might be a great option.
We have about 250 pages/posts on our site. These are the 3 plugins I’m really focused on (all load on every page):
1. Youtube Embed Plus – we only use this on about 15 pages
2. Download Manager – we only use this on about 2 pages
3. The Post Grid Pro – we only use this on the home page, and one other page
So from what I’m understanding, because we only use these plugins on a few pages, Plugin Organizer should work well with W3TC and Autoptimize?
I’m thinking maybe disable plugins across the site, and only enable them on the needed pages?
Also Jeff, as far as “You’ve got to have a really good grasp of what you are doing” – is there more detailed documention which might be helpful, so I can learn?
Thanks for any suggestions.
By “You’ve got to have a really good grasp of what you are doing” I mean that you have to understand how your plugins work and the effect you are having on them when you disable them on a page/post. So I don’t have any documentation on how your other plugins do ajax calls or processing on the backend. You need to understand what they do in order to know whether to disable them or not.
