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How to Resolve Common Conflicts Between Autoptimize and Caching Plugins

15 threads Sep 16, 2025 Plugin → Autoptimize

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Autoptimize is a powerful tool for optimizing your website's CSS, JavaScript, and HTML. However, users often encounter issues when running it alongside other performance plugins, particularly page caching solutions. Based on community discussions, this guide explains why these conflicts happen and provides the most effective solutions.

Why Do Conflicts Occur?

Autoptimize specializes in optimizing static assets like CSS and JavaScript files. Page caching plugins (e.g., WP Super Cache, WP Rocket, WP Fastest Cache) focus on generating and serving static HTML pages to reduce server load. The conflict arises when both plugins try to process the same files, leading to errors, broken layouts, or suboptimal performance. Essentially, they can end up "fighting" over how to handle your site's code.

The Most Common and Effective Solution

The overwhelmingly recommended solution from the Autoptimize team and community is straightforward: disable the optimization features in your page caching plugin.

When using Autoptimize with a page cache, you should configure them so that only one plugin handles each type of optimization. Since Autoptimize is specifically designed for asset optimization, it is best to let it handle that job exclusively.

How to Configure Your Caching Plugin:

  1. Navigate to the settings of your page caching plugin (e.g., WP Fastest Cache, WP Rocket, WP Super Cache).
  2. Find the sections for CSS, JavaScript, or HTML optimization. These might be labeled "Minify CSS," "Combine JS," or similar.
  3. Disable all of these options. Your page caching plugin should be used solely for its primary function—generating cached pages.
  4. Let Autoptimize manage all the minification, concatenation, and compression of your assets.

This configuration allows each plugin to do what it does best without interference. For example, a user found that disabling CSS and JS options in WP Fastest Cache resolved their conflict with Autoptimize.

What If Problems Persist?

If you continue to experience issues after reconfiguring your plugins, the problem might lie elsewhere. Here are two additional troubleshooting steps:

  • Exclude Admin Tools: By default, Autoptimize does not run on the WordPress admin dashboard. However, some admin-related tools or plugins (like Query Monitor) might need to be excluded from optimization. You can add specific paths to the exclusion list in Autoptimize's advanced settings if they are causing problems.
  • Check for Server-Level Caching: Autoptimize is designed to work with page caching, whether from a plugin, server-level (like Nginx Helper), or a third-party service like Cloudflare. There is no inherent conflict with these systems. The issue is almost always between two plugins trying to perform the same task.

Conclusion

Conflicts between Autoptimize and caching plugins are common but easily solvable. The key is to clearly define the roles of each plugin on your site. Use your caching plugin for page caching and rely on Autoptimize for asset optimization. This simple division of labor is the most reliable path to a faster, conflict-free website.

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