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I am using Wordpress for my Content management system. After a while I am trying to make it better performance wise and the tools I am using to analyse my website is Gtmetrix.

I have done a lot of performance optimization but there is one problem I can't solve, actually I don't even know when its being generated.

The problem is related to Expires Header for the following files:

connect.facebook.net/en_US/sdk.js#xfbml=1&version=v2.3
platform.twitter.com/widgets.js
platform.stumbleupon.com/1/widgets.js
apis.google.com/js/platform.js
www.facebook.com/impression.php/f38617d6c3bf89e/lid=115&payload=%7B%22source%22%3A%22jssdk%22%7D

I am also using Woocommerce.

Can you help me to remove this files from my website or at least add expire header to them? which I think is not possible since this file are being loaded from somewhere else right?!

Darren
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MMTDesigner
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  • You say the `"problem is related to Expires Header"`...but what is the problem? Load times? Errors? – Darren May 23 '16 at 05:20
  • No there are no errors only want to reduce load time – MMTDesigner May 23 '16 at 05:27
  • Yes, you are right, you can not add expiry header because this all are third party links, if you want to remove this you have to check from where these are loaded, you can deactivate some plugin to check this, find from your wp-content folder – Mukesh Ram May 23 '16 at 05:28

1 Answers1

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You cannot change the headers sent by websites you don't control.

Facebook, Twitter, StumbleUpon and Google all control their own headers and have their own reasons for the expiration time and other cache settings that they send through.

You can only make these changes on a domain that you control. In this case your options are:

  • Consider alternative ways to connect to these social networks. For example, you could code your own custom scripts, or find a Wordpress plugin that will run locally on your page (even with this, you may not totally be able to remove reliance on these external scripts, depending on the exact functionality you want)

  • Don't get hung up trying to get good results for everything GTMetrix tells you. Don't get me wrong, GTMetrix's suggestions are great and you can learn a lot from them, but it's rarely possible to do absolutely everything 100% of the time. Do your best, do what's under your control, and you'll definitely notice your site's speed (and hopefully ranking) increase.

For what it's worth, installing a local caching plugin like W3 Total Cache generally deals with several of GTMetrix's metrics in one go!

Tim Malone
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  • Thanks for comprehensive answer. My problem about using caching plugins is that, If I use them my payment gateway wouldn't work. Is there a possible way to remove this scripts from my website? The thing is I am not loading them in my theme and I think a plugin is doing that – MMTDesigner May 23 '16 at 11:54
  • @MMTdesigner Fair enough, caching on an e-commerce site brings its own challenges. In this case, I'd recommend disabling each plugin one by one to see which is loading these scripts. You can view the source of your page and refresh after each one to see when they disappear. – Tim Malone May 23 '16 at 20:50
  • Everything was helpful, Thank you so much – MMTDesigner May 24 '16 at 09:08