Last week I was at Smashing Conference in Oxford manning the WordPress.com stand with a few fellow Automatticians. I was asked a couple of times about why WordPress doesn’t automatically minify and concatenate scripts and stylesheets – the array of scripts and stylesheets that WordPress loads can be severely inflated by various plugins and themes and the hit to performance is not insignificant.

I can think of quite a few reasons why this isn’t handled automatically, but it did get me thinking that it wouldn’t be too difficult to build a plugin that does just that.

So I started sketching it out, before realising to my simultaneous delight and slight disappointment that someone has already done it. However I’m quite surprised that the plugin isn’t more broadly used and more known about – MinQueue only has 21 stars on GitHub and c. 3,300 downloads from the WordPress.org repository.

Anyway, I’ve been playing around with it and it’s excellent – nicely packaged and very easy to set up (and dig into if you’re interested in how it works.)

I think the vast majority of self-hosted WordPress sites would benefit from having it activated, especially given how easily you can set it up.