I would have thought using ‘defer’ would still be relevant, whether or not your JS files are combined or not. I was thinking of experimenting with 2 files - 1) AppConnect + jQuery combined, without defer 2) the reminaing js files, with defer. (I don’t think defer would make any difference to the js files which are placed just before the closing <body> tag.)
Surprisingly, PageSpeed gave one of my pages a score of 100 with defer (desktop), but it was already pretty generous with a non-defer version - giving a score of 94. The same page for mobile was 87/72 (defer/not). Mobile versions are obviously a litte more challenging, including suggestions about ‘next-gen’ image formats I probably wouldn’t bother with.
It would be interesting if using defer can shave a tenth of a second or two off your already optimised sites.
I’m glad to hear your safely back from your travels.
Thanks Tom, yes, because many times I can not join all files into one, in those cases I do still use defer, for things like livechat, booking engines etc. However I have found one of the biggest things is just plainly ignoring supplied solutions from sites like facebook, twitter etc. so as an example I will use a facebook, twitter, pinterest, google plus script from sharif over the one each provides, which made a massive difference, and allows me to add the scripts into my single file.
I would love to find a tool that could strip the script files and css files where rules or functions that are unused are not added to the final file, however I have not found one that does a good job of it unfortunately.
Just out of interest the default livechatinc.com js files load and reload every second or so on a sort of keep alive or something, but I have had to use that as the client swears by it.
Turns out, I did not add single quotes around my static text in tooltip attribute. Not an issue with defer.
So, instead of this dmx-bs-tooltip="LinkedIn"
it should be this dmx-bs-tooltip="'LinkedIn'"
