What to do with render-blocking scripts when plugins are call jQuery inline?

[ColossalYouth]

I've followed my usual process to speed up a WordPress Genesis build: conservative use of plugins, tidied up the theme where possible, used my favoured W3 Total Cache profile and implemented CloudFront CDN. But I'm still not getting great numbers back from PageSpeed Insights, which we now know is an SEO signal as of July this year.

The problem stems from not being able to put the jQuery library at the foot of the page because the theme I've customised is using a couple plugins that are calling jQuery inline before the library has loaded. I can't modify the plugins because I'm handing this over to a client who will likely update them at some point, so with that in mind does anyone have a solution that would allow me to stop the jQuery library render-blocking? That's the main factor that's stopping me from getting a decent score on PSI - when I remove the library I'm pushing 95 despite the usual issue with the Maps API and caching etc.

If anyone has any thoughts it would be much appreciated. I'm sure other people must be frustrated by this as well.

[JiveDig]

I haven’t found a good solution to this besides using a different plugin. This has been a frustration for us as well, and our main culprit is Gravity Forms. It’s unbelievable such a powerful and popular plugin would do this without a reasonable solution to disable or enqueue a script the right way.

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Lead developer of Mai Theme

[malton]

Google PageSpeed gives poor results on The Studiopress site, as well as the two sites I have developed with Genesis.
None of the StudioPress theme pages I have tested get over 33 on the speed score, (under 49 is slow) based on the lab data analyzed by Lighthouse.
Is it just plugins or is it the Genesis engine?

This page: https://www.studiopress.com/features/?_ga=2.175686434.1281125912.1550263348-768896535.1430858346
Gets 29

This page: https://my.studiopress.com/themes/academy/#demo-full
Gets 15!

Eliminate render-blocking resources
Resources are blocking the first paint of your page. Consider delivering critical JS/CSS inline and deferring all non-critical JS/styles.

What is an invested user to do about this?

[Author]

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