Controlling load order of enqueued WordPress scripts and stylesheets

Another in a long line of stuff that is easy to do once you find out how to do it.

I was working on a WordPress theme and I wanted to incorporate UI Kit into this theme. I was trying to be a good WordPress citizen and so was enqueueing both UI Kit’s CSS and my main CSS. I’m honestly not convinced this is necessary for a theme you’re building for a specific site but what the heck.

My concern was, UI Kit has a lot of default styles that I was intending to over-ride [we weren’t organized enough for me to go with a custom UK Kit theme] in my style.css file, so it was important that style.css get loaded last.

So, we need to do two calls for the enqueueing. First we load up UI Kit’s CSS and javascript files:


function mytheme_scripts()
{
// UI Kit
wp_enqueue_style('uikit', get_template_directory_uri() . '/css/uikit.min.css');
wp_enqueue_script('uikit', get_template_directory_uri() . '/js/uikit.min.js');
wp_enqueue_script('uikit_icons', get_template_directory_uri() . '/js/uikit-icons.min.js');

}
add_action( ‘wp_enqueue_scripts’, ‘mytheme_scripts’ );

Then we make a second add_action call to enqueue style.css, Note the trailing 99 in the add_action. That represents the priority, or order files will be loaded. The default is 10. 99 might be overkill but if we ever need to add something between the two we have ample ‘room’ to do so.


add_action('wp_enqueue_scripts', function(){
wp_enqueue_style('main-style', get_template_directory_uri() . '/style.css');
}, 99);

If we view source of the page it looks like this. WordPress still prioritizes style sheets before js, so style.css gets included after UI Kit’s css but before UI Kit’s javascript:

<link rel='stylesheet' id='uikit-css' href='https://dev.sample.local/wp-content/themes/sample/css/uikit.min.css?ver=5.3.3' type='text/css' media='all' />
<link rel='stylesheet' id='main-style-css' href='https://dev.sample.local/wp-content/themes/sample/style.css?ver=5.3.3' type='text/css' media='all' />
<script type='text/javascript' src='https://dev.sample.local/wp-content/themes/sample/js/uikit.min.js?ver=5.3.3'></script>
<script type='text/javascript' src='https://dev.sample.local/wp-content/themes/sample/js/uikit-icons.min.js?ver=5.3.3'></script>

Simple enough. One of those things where it took me longer to realize I could add a priority to add_action than it did to make the change.