Performance & assets
Combining and minifying assets only helps if it's actually solving a real bottleneck — the right first step is always to measure, not guess. Run a page through a tool like Lighthouse or PageSpeed Insights to see which requests are actually slow before deciding what to merge, defer or minify; otherwise you can spend effort "optimizing" something that was never the problem. web.dev: Measure performance
Asset Optimizer lists no CSS/JS to combine
Symptom: the Asset Optimizer shows nothing to combine, even though the site loads assets.
Cause: it detects assets by doing an internal homepage render, which a full-page cache (e.g. WP Engine) can serve from cache — hiding the real asset list.
Fix: visit any page with ?fw_asset_optimizer_discover=1 appended to force a fresh render, then
return to the settings and refresh. See Asset Optimizer.
A script broke after I combined it
Symptom: a script stops working once it's included in the combined bundle.
Cause: JS combining is conservative by design (only safe local footer scripts are merged), but a third-party script you ticked may not tolerate being merged.
Fix: uncheck that script so it loads on its own again. The combined bundle is dependency-ordered; the Defer switch is safe, and the Minify switch is experimental — leave it off if you see issues.