Zero Blocks Given

Description

Most WooCommerce stores ship 80-150 KB of block CSS and JS that the store never actually renders. The WC BlockPatterns scanner is the one that bugs me most – it hits the filesystem on every request to scan a directory of pattern templates you don’t use. Then add core WP global-styles, wp-block-library and font-faces on top, and you’re loading a Gutenberg frontend you probably switched off a long time ago.

Zero Blocks Given turns it off at the source, through WooCommerce’s own dependency injection container. No CSS dequeue band-aid, no UI checkboxes, no PRO upsell. One constant in wp-config.php, pick a tier, done.

How it works

Here’s the thing – WC registers its block hooks as closures wrapping instance methods on container-managed objects. So you can’t remove_action() them by string. You have to fetch the same instance back from the DI container and pass it in as the callable. That’s what this does:

$bp = \Automattic\WooCommerce\Blocks\Package::container()->get( BlockPatterns::class );
remove_action( 'init', [ $bp, 'register_block_patterns' ] );

The DI-container path is the one that survives WC upgrades cleanly. String-callback matching and dequeue tricks tend to drift every release, so I went with the container.

Four modes. Three ways to set them.

Mode
What it turns off
When to use it

patterns
WC BlockPatterns directory scanner only
Block-based Cart/Checkout – keeps all blocks rendering, just skips the file-I/O scan

blocks
patterns + BlockTypesController + Notices styles + wc-blocks-style handle
Classic-shortcode WC stores

all
blocks + WP global-styles pipeline + theme.json + font-faces + head <style> strip
Sites with no Gutenberg frontend at all

nuclear
all + unregister_block_type() for every core block
Page-builder sites – strips the editor inserter clean

Default is all. Set the mode you want with any of these:

1. The <dialog> settings – click the Settings link on the Plugins screen. Native HTML dialog, four radios, save. No menu items, nothing else added to your admin.
2. A constant in wp-config.php – define( 'ZEROBLG_MODE', 'patterns' );. This wins over the dialog. Good devops escape hatch.
3. A filter in a theme or mu-plugin – add_filter( 'zeroblg/mode', fn() => 'blocks' );. Used when neither the constant nor the dialog set a value.

Resolution order: constant, then settings, then filter, then all. An invalid value at any step just falls through to the next.

A few real cases

• Service-form site on WC. You sell consultations, not products – no cart, no checkout. mode=all strips every block stylesheet across the site.
• Classic-shortcode WC store. You use [woocommerce_cart] and [woocommerce_checkout], no block UI. mode=blocks turns off the block frontend without touching your classic flow.
• Block-checkout store with bloated patterns. You run the new Cart/Checkout blocks but never the WC pattern library. mode=patterns skips just the directory scanner – saves the disk hit, leaves your checkout alone.
• FrankenPHP / worker mode. All hooks are idempotent, no $GLOBALS writes, \Throwable catches around the DI lookups. Safe in a worker.
• Elementor / Divi WC stores. The page builder renders its own checkout, so mode=all clears the WC and WP block CSS your theme never uses anyway.

Why I built it this way

• Activate it and it works – mode=all is the default, no setup needed.
• No settings page to learn. One constant or one filter is the whole API.
• Pure PHP. No database rows, no admin scripts, no frontend JS.
• No external requests, no tracking, nothing phoning home. GDPR is a non-issue.
• It uses the same Package::container() lookup as WC core, so it follows WC’s own object lifecycle instead of guessing.
• Worker-safe – FrankenPHP, Roadrunner, Swoole. No die, no exit, no session writes.
• mu-plugin friendly. Drop the folder into wp-content/mu-plugins/ and it loads itself.
• GPL, no upsells. No PRO tier, no Freemius, no admin notice nagging you for a review.

From the maker of WP Multitool

This plugin handles the frontend block bloat. If you also want the backend cleaned up, that’s what WP Multitool does – slow queries, autoload bloat, the database bottlenecks that caching plugins just hide instead of fixing. Most optimization plugins guess at the problem. WP Multitool runs EXPLAIN and shows you. 14 tools in there – slow-query analyzer, autoload optimizer, index suggestions, fatal-error recovery – and a free site scanner if you want to see what’s slow before paying for anything. If Zero Blocks Given earned a spot in your stack, that one probably will too.