Is it considered good practise to have jQuery scripts in a PHP conditional? [closed]

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I have several jQuery scripts that are used on my website, but not on every page. I place these scripts in a PHP conditional so that it only outputs them on the required pages.

Now what I'm wondering is: is this considered good practice? Does this speed up the website? Are there even any positive aspects to using this method?

<?php if ( is_home() ) { ?>

    <script>
        //jQuery code
        //jQuery code
        //jQuery code
    </script>

<?php } ?>

Answer 1

Even though there is nothing wrong with doing this you are giving up browser-side caching for a minor temporary convenience. I say temporary because this is definitely not something I would deploy on a larger scale system.

The reason browser-side caching is being given up is because a PHP file is always requested fresh by the browser because it is assumed to have dynamic data.

I would recommend a /assets/js/pages/home.js layout for your JS files which get conditionally included as an external file because this will be much more scalable in the future:

<?php if ( is_home() ) { ?>

    <script src="/assets/js/pages/home.js"></script>

<?php } ?>