Honestly, I don't know if this is the right section to ask this. Today I ran into a couple plugin conflicts that made me start thinking about this. I wound up having to do kind of a hack where the plugin files only appear in the head of the home page because it was causing display issues with other plugins. But to the point... loading a jquery script, plus all of the wordpress plugins .js and .css files, they all load in the head whether or not the wordpress or jquery plugin is used on that page, and I'm wondering if this is bad practice as far as site speed goes, or does minimizing them all reduce file size enough that its not an issue? Some appear to be minimized and some aren't, mainly the CSS files usually arent so that you can customize them.
So what do you guys usually do about this? Is there a need for the plugin files to appear only on the pages theyre used? Do you minimize everything once the site is complete? Is there a plugin that manages this?