WordPress How To Remove Query Strings From CSS & JS

Everybody wants a faster website and who can blame you?  You spend hours drooling over Google’s Page Speed Insights test but you have no idea how to improve on the number.  Here’s a quick code snippet on how to remove the version query strings from WordPress JS and CSS files using only a few lines of code.

Simply add the following to your themes functions.php file and save the file.  This will automatically work out of the box with any asset that is being loaded using wp_enqueue_script or wp_enqueue_style which should be any file being loaded by your theme or plugins.

function wpc_remove_script_version( $src ){
    return remove_query_arg( 'ver', $src );
}

add_filter( 'script_loader_src', 'wpc_remove_script_version' );
add_filter( 'style_loader_src', 'wpc_remove_script_version' ); 

It should be noted that this can effect caching and proper renders of updated files if you use a caching plugin or a CDN service such as Cloudflare. When WordPress or your plugins are updated, a new version number is appended to the end of the resource which tells the caching service that the file has changed. Removing these version numbers will cause the caching service to not be aware if/when the file is changed. Therefore, you need to be proactive after a WordPress or plugin update to manually clear the cached resources of that plugin/theme to ensure that the newest version will be called.

This change can effectively improve your Google Page Speed Insights test as well as your search engine optimization.