You can stop the Contact Form 7 plugin’s script and stylesheet from loading on every page of your WordPress blog. While the plugin is a great one to install, since it makes creating contact forms easy, you probably don’t want to load the script and stylesheet on every page. For those that one to get every ounce of performance out of their blog, you definitely don’t want those two resources to load each time.
The good news is that it is easy to only load the plugin’s resources on a specific page of your WordPress blog. By simply creating a few lines of code in the functions.php file of your current theme, you can control when scripts and stylesheets are loaded for many plugins that you have installed. Let’s look at how to do this for the Contact Form 7 plugin.
Deregistering Scripts and Stylesheets
Many plugins use the wp_enqueue_script WordPress function to load supporting Javascript files. The wp_enqueue_style function may be used to load any stylesheets used by the plugin. Now, not all plugins use these two functions as they may use PHP’s “echo” command instead. If a plugin does use the WordPress functions, you can then use two other WordPress functions to unregister the resources when they aren’t needed. The two WordPress functions are: wp_deregister_script and wp_deregister_style.
To unregister either a stylesheet or script you will need their handle, which was created when the wp_enqueue_script or wp_enqueue_style was called. You can easily find this by searching through the plugin’s files until you find where the stylesheet or script is registered.
For the Contact Form 7 plugin, the following lines of code are used to register the script and stylesheet:
wp_enqueue_style( 'contact-form-7', wpcf7_plugin_url( 'styles.css' ), array(), WPCF7_VERSION, 'all' );
The code highlighted in green shows the two handles that will be used to deregister the resources. Next we must add the code needed to prevent the script and stylesheet from loading for each page.
Deregister the Contact Form 7 Script and Stylesheet
To only load the Contact Form 7 Javascript and stylesheet on one page, add the following PHP code to your functions.php file:
function my_deregister_javascript() {
if ( !is_page('Contact') ) {
wp_deregister_script( 'contact-form-7' );
}
}
add_action( 'wp_print_styles', 'my_deregister_styles', 100 );
function my_deregister_styles() {
if ( !is_page('Contact') ) {
wp_deregister_style( 'contact-form-7' );
}
}
The above code will check to see if the page loaded isn’t the “Contact” page, and if it isn’t, then the script and stylesheet used by the Contact Form 7 plugin are deregistered. Simply replace the page name that I have in the above code with the page that has your contact form. Of course, you can extend the if statement to include multiple pages as well.
I have used similar code to prevent other unnecessary scripts and stylesheets from load on every page from other plugins. You may not be able to disable some of the scripts or stylesheets, but if you can get most of them, your blog should load up quicker.