Disable Dashicons

Dashicons is the icon font WordPress uses throughout wp-admin and in the admin bar. It is loaded on the front end as well, because a logged-in user might see the admin bar there.

For a logged-out visitor there is no admin bar, so the font is downloaded and never used. This feature dequeues it for logged-out visitors only. Logged-in users still get it, and wp-admin is completely unaffected.

One caution matters here. Some themes use Dashicons in their front-end design – for menu arrows, social icons or search buttons. If yours does, those icons will disappear for visitors.

The Dashicons stylesheet is roughly 30KB and, unlike a script, a font stylesheet is render-blocking: the browser will not paint text that depends on it until it has loaded. Paying that on every public page for an icon set the visitor cannot see is pure waste.

It is one of the larger single savings available among the asset-trimming features, which is why it is worth the two minutes of checking your theme before enabling it.

Vectro checks whether the current request has a logged-in user and dequeues the dashicons stylesheet handle only when it does not. Because the check is per request, a logged-in editor browsing the front end still receives the font and sees the admin bar rendered correctly.

This is a dequeue of the WordPress-registered handle. A theme that loads Dashicons under its own handle, or links the font directly in a template, is not affected by this setting.