Question

I have been optimizing my website but the one problem that stands in my way is all the jQuery functions that I do not use. The only ones that I use are for a smooth page scroller. It just seems like such a waste of download time.

My question is: Is there any script or program that will remove the jQuery code that I do not need and leave the 1 or 2 functions that I do need.

Answer 1

There’s no way to do this, especially since it’s not that simple. For example .fadeIn() is one method, but it calls the whole animation section of jQuery to fade the element, but that’s after your selector has accessed the traversal section including the Sizzle selector engine…that’s how most frameworks are, it’d be very tricky to remove pieces because of so many dependencies inside the framework itself.

That being said, if you’re delivering jQuery correctly, it’s minified and gzipped, and you’re only sending about 24kb to the client which they cache so it’s just sent once, not every page load. Also, they may have already cached it from another site, the more people who point their site to the same CDN (the page you’re viewing does) the more likely this is to happen.

Google has a CDN, details here, for example from there you can grab jQuery, or jQuery UI:

• http://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/jquery/1.4.2/jquery.min.js
• http://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/jqueryui/1.8.0/jquery-ui.min.js
• Previous versions of these as well

Also, Microsoft has a CDN, details here, you can fran jQuery and the validation library from it:

• http://ajax.microsoft.com/ajax/jQuery/jquery-1.4.2.min.js
• http://ajax.microsoft.com/ajax/jQuery.Validate/1.6/jQuery.Validate.js
• Full list of validation files here

Note: these are the current versions as of the time of this answer, don’t use these explicit links if you’re finding this later, there may be more recent versions available.