Description
Featherweight makes your site faster by switching off the features you don’t use. Every disabled item is one less HTTP request, one less script, or one less query — adding up to lighter pages and better Core Web Vitals. Pick only what you need; nothing is forced on.
Formerly WP Disable. Same plugin, new name. Featherweight is part of the Folium Studio suite — your existing settings carry over untouched on update.
Reduce requests & strip front-end bloat
- Disable emojis (removes the emoji detection script and styles)
- Remove query strings from static assets (
?ver=...) for cleaner caching - Disable oEmbeds (the auto-embed script that loads site-wide)
- Disable Gravatars
- Remove jQuery Migrate on the front end
- Combine and asynchronously load Google Fonts and Font Awesome
- Add DNS-prefetch hints for external hosts
- Remove the password-strength-meter script where it isn’t needed
- Drop Dashicons on the front end when the admin toolbar is hidden
Clean up the page header
- Remove the generator tag, shortlink, RSD, Windows Live Writer, and REST API link tags
Comments & discussion
- Disable comments everywhere, or selectively per post type
- Close comments on older posts and paginate long threads
- Strip links from comments
- Disable pingbacks and trackbacks
- Schedule automatic spam-comment cleanup
Admin & performance controls
- Limit or disable post revisions and autosave
- Control the WordPress Heartbeat (frequency and where it runs)
- Disable the REST/XML feeds (RSS), XML-RPC, author archive pages, and admin notices
SEO helpers
- Remove the Yoast SEO HTML comment from the head
- Remove duplicate names in Yoast breadcrumbs
Optional WooCommerce optimisations
When WooCommerce is active, you can stop its scripts and styles from loading on non-store pages, defer cart fragments, disable product reviews, and skip the password-strength meter on unrelated pages.
Good to know
- Disabling emojis does not affect normal emoticons — it only removes the extra emoji-detection script.
- Removing query strings can interfere with some CDNs that key cache on them; leave it off if unsure.
- Everything is optional and reversible — toggle a setting off and the behaviour returns.
Have an idea or found a bug? The plugin is developed in the open — see the public GitHub repo to contribute or open an issue.
Installation
This section describes how to install the plugin and get it working.
- Upload the plugin files to the
/wp-content/plugins/plugin-namedirectory, or install the plugin through the WordPress plugins screen directly. - Activate the plugin through the ‘Plugins’ screen in WordPress
- Open the Folium Featherweight screen to configure the plugin
FAQ
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I would like to contribute/I have an idea
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Public repo on GitHub if you would like to contribute or have any ideas to add.
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What about Minification, do I still need it?
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Yes — minification helps on-page performance, but that’s outside the remit of this plugin. Featherweight focuses on removing the requests and bloat WordPress adds by default; pair it with a dedicated minification tool if you want that too.
Reviews
Mis-Genver 14, 2021
I use this plugin on all the sites I work on and it reduces speeds. I only wish author would update it more, because it would be a shame that such a great plugin would go to waste.
Gwynngala 28, 2020
This did a great job reducing useless requests and code for emojis, loading dashicons for non-admin users and things like that. It’s a simple install and, as mentioned, it is a free and open source plugin that competes nicely with some paid plugins.
If you just want to get rid of emojis, try Autoptimize (the Extra settings) or Ryan Hellyer’s Disable Emojis plugin, but you’re still going to have all the other stuff this gets rid of.
If you want to pay money, you can match this and maybe get rid of a bit more cruft with the perfmatters Premium plugin ($25/yr).
In my experience, it’s pretty common for an optimization plugin to cause a 500 error. There are a lot of little things that can go wrong and if you are trying to push performance by doing things the platform (Wordpress) is not designed to do (in fact is designed NOT to do), you have to be ready for some collateral damage.
In my case, this plugin worked flawlessly, but I would recommend that any plugin like this be tested on a staging platform first and then deployed to a live site.
Est 28, 2020
Hello,
This is my first review, and i am doing it, because the atual ranking is unfair. The plugin should have more positive reviews and more downloads.
It’s a free plugin, with no adverstising. But have the same and more feature then premium or freemium plugins. Just compare it with perfmatters or clearfy (these last, don’t have Woocommerce configurations, for example).
Lets be fair, install and compare all.
Ebrel 30, 2020
I usually do not post reviews unless something is extremely good or extremely bad.
This one falls into the EXTREMELY BAD category. It literally took my site down with a 500 error. I had to manually go into WP, delete the plugin folder, go into my DB and deactivate all the plugins there to finally be able to get into my admin menu and start reactivating those plugins that work.
If you try to do a CLI uninstall through the php script, it returns an error.
STAY AWAY.
Ebrel 7, 2020
⚡ So great! Took <15m to get 2 sites to load in under 3s!
It took me about 15 minutes to do for both my WP sites just now, and it works by allowing people to simply toggle on/off WordPress features they don’t need.
Granted, I am able to disable almost everything because I don’t need many of WordPress’ built-in features, but that’s the point.
Excellent job on this plugin folks. 🙏 Thank you and keep up the good work!
Ebrel 2, 2019
I used this plugin to optimize the speed of my website and I had an Internal Server Error and the website went down.
Contributors & Developers
“Featherweight — formerly WP Disable” is open source software. The following people have contributed to this plugin.
Contributors
“Featherweight — formerly WP Disable” has been translated into 4 locales. Thank you to the translators for their contributions.
Translate “Featherweight — formerly WP Disable” into your language.
Interested in development?
Browse the code, check out the SVN repository, or subscribe to the development log by RSS.
Changelog
2.2.1
- The Folium suite menu now uses a leaf icon (fitting — “Folium” is Latin for leaf).
- Sitewise now shows as “Coming soon” in the Folium overview until it’s publicly released, rather than linking out.
2.2.0
- WP Disable is now Featherweight — a new name and look as part of the Folium Studio suite. Nothing else changes: same plugin, same slug, same settings (everything you’ve configured carries over automatically on update).
- New plugin icon and banner.
- Refreshed the readme and FAQ.
- Coming soon: Rank Math support, alongside the existing Yoast SEO helpers.
- Housekeeping: removed the unused pre-Folium dashboard, the old cross-plugin add-on installer, and their assets — a smaller, lighter download. No change to any optimisation feature or setting.
2.1.0
- New admin experience: WP Disable now opens inside the shared “Folium” menu with a redesigned, tabbed settings screen (dashboard, live optimisation count, instant search). All existing settings and their behaviour are unchanged.
- Settings are saved over ajax using the same validation as before — no change to what gets stored.
2.0.2
- Hardening: block direct access to all plugin PHP files.
- The SEO tab now only appears when a supported SEO plugin (Yoast SEO) is active, and fixed a settings message typo. Props @JeroenSormani.
- Refreshed the plugin description.
2.0.1
- Housekeeping: corrected the Contributors field to a valid WordPress.org username and shortened the short description to meet the 150-character directory limit.
2.0.0
- Major modernization for current WordPress (6.x) and PHP 7.4+ / 8.x.
- Removed the obsolete “local Google Analytics” offload (Universal Analytics was sunset by Google in July 2023). Existing GA settings, cron and cache are cleaned up automatically on upgrade.
- Fixed: spam-comment cleaner now deletes correctly; “remove links from comments” no longer blanks comment text; Google Fonts / Font Awesome saved-request counters corrected.
- Fixed: jQuery Migrate removal no longer downgrades core jQuery on modern WordPress.
- Security: output escaping, input sanitization, safe redirects, and sanitized server variables throughout.
- Compliance: unified text domain to “wp-disable”, added Requires PHP / Requires at least headers, refreshed branding.
- Removed legacy duplicate/dead code and updated the plugin name per WordPress.org guidelines.
1.5.14
- Started on Documentation
- Added donation button – help us make this the best optimisation suite available on the repo. Every $ donated helps.
- Added SEO Tab
- Added ability to remove Duplicate names in breadcrumbs
- Added Remove Yoast SEO comments
- Tested on Gutenberg
- Tested on WP 4.9
- Remove Dequeue from some functions
- Disabled Dashicons in Customizer
- Minor bug fixes as per support forum
1.5.13
- Added Settings link on main Installed Plugin view
- General code tidy up
- PHP 7.1 compatabile
- WP 4.8.2 tested
1.5.12
- WooCommerce bugs fixed
- Syntax error fixed
- General improvements to GA Offload (Some cases GA code may still not work, does not appear to be a fix for this, if this happens on yours, please ignore the feature)
1.5.11
- WooCommerce tab not displaying fixed
1.5.1
- More visual cleanups
- Removed all webfonts
- Minor bug fix on reporting on dashboard
- Plugin is now under 240kb
1.5.0
- Finished redesign of plugin
- All stats now in one central dashboard
- Removed sidebar navigation completely
- Remobed Freemius
- Added check for WooCommerce, so Woo related stuff only shows if Woo is installed
- Much tighter integration between the 3 optimisation plugins
- Removed old/excess files
1.4.5
- More visual fixes/general tidy up
- Added exception to Google Maps so can be enabled per page
- Minor code fixes
- Moved Google Analytics to sidebar/addons
1.4.4
- Added ability to stop (disable) admin notices from showing
- removed the stats sub menu item, so everything is now at the top level
- “local-ga.js” file was created on activation, changed the way this works so it will work now independent of when adding the GA code
1.4.3
More dashboard visual tweaks.
No new features, but this is a stepping stone.
1.4.2
- General tidy up on dashboard
1.4.1
- removed third party errors out of our dashboard to the top of the page where they belong
- cleaned out redundant data in GA cache file
1.4.0
- New Dashboard Design (Work in progress)
- Added Average load time of pages to stats
- Remove Comments navigation when comments disabled
- Added the ability to block referrer spam (using Piwik Database)
- Updated Import/Export settings to now include settings for Image Compression and Cache plugins (if active)
- General code improvements