Resources & Assets

Location: Step 9 — Resources & Assets

This step controls two groups of explicit Allow rules. The point is not to block — it is to make sure search engines and rendering-aware crawlers can reach the files they need to render the site correctly.

What this step controls

Two toggles:

• Allow CSS & JS Files — adds explicit Allow rules for the stylesheet and script patterns under /wp-content/ and /wp-includes/.
• Allow Images — adds explicit Allow rules for image paths.

When enabled, the plugin writes Allow directives that override any earlier Disallow covering those paths.

How to decide

Keep both on for almost every site. Blocking CSS or JS is one of the most damaging configurations in robots.txt because:

• search engines render pages before indexing, and missing CSS or JS changes how content is parsed;
• mobile-friendliness, Core Web Vitals, and structured-data extraction all depend on the renderer reaching the assets;
• image discovery (Google Images, image-aware AI crawlers) depends on image paths remaining allowable.

Turn off only when:

• a deliberate stack-level decision keeps certain asset paths private;
• a separate hosting setup serves these assets and the WordPress paths are unused.

What this step does not do

This step does not:

• override noindex headers — those are emitted at the HTML level, not in robots.txt;
• guarantee that every crawler will fetch the assets — some lightweight crawlers skip resource fetching by design;
• speed up the site by itself. Performance optimization lives at the asset and CDN layer.

Plan tier

Both toggles are available on every tier — they are part of the safer default posture.

Related

• What happens when you block Googlebot
• Robots.txt and JavaScript rendering
• The 5 most common robots.txt mistakes