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Aero V2 10 1 Optimization Screen
The Optimization screen (Aero → Optimization) is where Aero rewrites your page output: minifying assets, changing how CSS and JS load, self-hosting fonts, and trimming what WordPress core loads on every request. This runs on every render that isn’t already served from Batcache or Edge Cache, and it’s also the screen most directly responsible for your PageSpeed Insights and Lighthouse scores, since nearly every setting here maps to a specific PSI audit. To verify Aero is actually running on a given page, view source (Ctrl+U / Cmd+Option+U) and look for a comment near the end reading Optimized by Aero vX.X.X. For a full settings summary instead of a single page check, use the Debug report.

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Core Optimizations

On by default, and there’s rarely a reason to turn any of these off.

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Delivery Optimization

This is where PageSpeed scores are actually won or lost. These settings change when and how resources load, which is more impactful than pure minification but also where you’re most likely to need to test after flipping a switch.
Detects your page’s likely Largest Contentful Paint image, preloads it with fetchpriority="high", and removes lazy-loading from it specifically. This directly answers PageSpeed’s “LCP image was lazily loaded” and “LCP image discovered late” warnings, two of the most common LCP-score killers on image-heavy pages.
No JavaScript runs until the visitor moves, scrolls, taps, or types, then everything restores in the original order. Because lab testing tools like Lighthouse never interact with a page, Total Blocking Time collapses, often by one to three full seconds. This is the single highest-leverage setting on this screen for a poor mobile PSI score, and also the one most likely to break something if a script needs to run immediately (a chat widget, an above-fold slider, anything triggering on DOMContentLoaded). Test your menus, sliders, and any interactive above-fold element after turning this on, and use Exclude from Delay below for anything that broke.
Stylesheets stop blocking first paint, using a media="print" swap technique with a no-JS fallback. Without Critical CSS filled in below, the page can flash unstyled for a moment (“FOUC”). Add your header/hero rules to Critical CSS before or immediately after enabling this to avoid that.

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Delay and async fine-tuning

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Font Optimization

Remote web fonts force two serial cross-origin round trips before any text renders at all, consistently one of the largest single PageSpeed penalties on typical WordPress sites. This section is Aero’s answer.
Strips every Google Fonts request outright, the browser falls back to system fonts. Only for sites deliberately using a system-font stack. This overrides every other font setting above, so leave it off unless that’s specifically your intent.
Adobe Fonts (TypeKit) can’t be self-hosted, since kit CSS is licensed and dynamically subset per account. Aero applies preconnect and preload to TypeKit instead of localizing it.
The screen also shows a live status row: how many stylesheets and files are localized, and what Aero detected on your last frontend visit (Google Fonts localized vs. remote, TypeKit detected or not). Check this after enabling font optimization to confirm it actually caught your theme’s font requests.

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Exclusions

Compatibility escape hatches. If one specific file misbehaves when optimized, exclude that file here instead of disabling the feature for your entire site. Each field takes one entry per line, matched as a case-insensitive fragment of the file URL, so slider-pro matches any file with that string anywhere in its path.

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WordPress Bloat

WordPress core loads a surprising amount of markup and JavaScript on every page that most sites never use. This section trims it, and it’s a section worth reading carefully rather than enabling wholesale, since a few of these genuinely depend on your setup.
Drops roughly 15KB of emoji-detection JS/CSS loaded on every page. Emojis still render correctly, since every modern browser supports them natively without WordPress’s polyfill.
Removes the RSD link, Windows Live Writer manifest, shortlink tag, and the WordPress version meta tag. That last one is a minor security win too, since it stops broadcasting your exact core version to anyone looking.
Removes wp-embed.js and oEmbed discovery links. Keep this off if other sites embed your posts as rich cards (a common pattern for news and blog content); turn it on if you know that never happens for your content.
Frontend only. Safe on modern, actively maintained themes. Only plugins written for pre-2016 jQuery patterns actually need Migrate. Test your interactive elements after enabling; if something breaks, that plugin or theme is the reason, and you may need to leave this off until it’s updated.
Dequeues the ~46KB admin icon font for logged-out visitors. Keep this off if your theme displays Dashicons on the public-facing site (some themes do, for social icons or UI elements); it’s safe if Dashicons only ever show up in wp-admin.

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Admin-side tuning

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Custom CSS

A site-wide custom CSS field, injected on the frontend for all regular visitors. This is a plain styling tool, not an optimization setting, useful for quick fixes (hiding a broken element, patching a layout issue) without editing your theme directly.
Guest-Mode-only custom CSS is a separate field, covered on the Experimental page. Don’t confuse the two: this field’s CSS is seen by everyone, that one’s is seen only by PageSpeed-style testing tools (Lighthouse, GTmetrix, Pingdom, and more).

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How this maps to real metrics

If you’re chasing a specific Core Web Vitals number, here’s the honest mapping:
  • LCP (Largest Contentful Paint): Preload the LCP Image, font self-hosting, and Async CSS + Critical CSS here, plus WebP/AVIF conversion to shrink the image payload itself.
  • INP / TBT (interactivity): Delay JavaScript Until Interaction is the single biggest lever, by a wide margin.
  • CLS (layout shift): mostly outside this screen’s scope; it’s usually an image-dimension or web-font-swap issue. Font-display: swap (on by default here) helps, but check your theme for missing width/height attributes on images too.
None of this replaces having genuinely useful content on the page. Speed is a floor, not a ceiling: Google’s own guidance on optimizing for AI search is explicit that a fast, technically clean site is table stakes, not a substitute for content that’s actually worth someone’s time.
Last modified on August 24, 2026