Question

My wordpress site is a bit heavy to download. On the frontend, its including jquery unnecessarily. In my firebug it looks like:

jquery.js?ver=1.3.2

and

jquery.form.js?ver=2.02m

I don’t need these to be included for me.

I’m happy for them to remain in the wp-admin, but I’d like them not to load on the frontend.

I have found the file I think which is loading them in wp-includes/script-loader.php but I’m not sure what to uncomment out or what to do to remove it completely for the front.

Is there a way to do this, removing jquery without ruining the back end?

Answer 1

JQuery may be being added by your theme. If your theme is adding it properly, it should be using the wp_enqueue_script() function. To remove JQuery, simply use the wp_deregister_script() function.

wp_deregister_script('jquery');

Removing JQuery for your whole site might cause some unintended consequences for your admin section. To avoid removing JQuery on your admin pages, use this code instead:

if ( !is_admin() ) wp_deregister_script('jquery');

Now only pages that are not admin pages will run the wp_deregister_script() function.

Add this code to the functions.php file in your theme directory.