In this WP Tavern episode, Nathan Wrigley interviews Weston Ruter at WordCamp US in Portland. Weston shares insights from his presentation on WordPress performance, discussing improvements made by the Core Performance Team, including lazy loading, enhanced responsive images, and speculative loading. They explore the challenges of maintaining speed as plugins increase site complexity, browser and…
On the podcast today we have Felix Arntz who discusses speculative loading, a new WordPress 6.8 feature designed to make websites faster by preloading pages before users navigate to them. Felix explains how it works, why WordPress uses a conservative default setting for broad compatibility, and how more eager configurations are possible with plugins or…
WordPress’ Performance team is proposing merging Performant Translations into core in time for the upcoming WordPress 6.5 release. After an in-depth performance analysis earlier this year revealed that translations can significantly impact server response times, the team discussed various solutions and landed on one that requires no configuration from users. More than 2,000 WordPress sites have tested…
WordPress’ Performance Team has published a summary of a core performance analysis they completed in order to identify and prioritize areas for improvement. As part of this process, contributors created a methodology with a standard set of tools that can be used to collect and share profiling data for various components of the application. The…
WordPress’ Performance Team contributors have merged a new experimental SQLite integration module that is on track to be included in the upcoming version 1.8.0 of the Performance Lab plugin. (This is the plugin that contains a collection of feature plugins with performance-related modules the team hopes to land in WordPress core.) The new module allows…
The last two chapters of the 2022 Web Almanac were released this week – Structured Data and Performance, completing the 729-page ebook of the report. The WordPress-specific chapter was published earlier this month with metrics that indicate adoption is growing. The Performance chapter was written by Etsy performance engineer Melissa Ada and Google web transparency engineer Rick…
WP Super Cache, one of the oldest and most widely used static caching plugins for WordPress, is changing hands. After 15 years, the plugin’s author, Donncha Ó Caoimh, is handing over maintenance and development to Jetpack’s performance team. If you have been building WordPress sites since the early days, you are almost guaranteed to have…
In the near future, WordPress may be able to provide better caching recommendations for site owners. Performance team contributors are proposing two new Site Health checks for Persistent Object Cache and Full Page Cache. The modules have been tested inside the Performance Lab plugin and version 1.2.0 has them both in a state the team says…
On the podcast today we have Felix Arntz. Felix is a Developer Relations Engineer at Google and a WordPress core committer. He is the lead engineer for the Site Kit plugin for WordPress and has been a regular contributor to WordPress for several years. He’s also been involved in the newly created WordPress performance team…
Some new data from a recent Core Web Vitals (CWV) technology report produced by the HTTP Archive shows WordPress sites running newer versions have lower CWV pass rates. The original report was published in July by Rick Viscomi, one of the maintainers of the HTTP Archive. The site provides a permanent repository of web performance…
Yoast and Google-sponsored WordPress core contributors are proposing the project add a Performance team to improve core performance as measured by Google’s Web Vitals metrics. “Users expect and prefer fast experiences (consciously or otherwise),” Yoast-sponsored full-time core contributor Ari Stathopoulos said. “Research shows that fast websites can provide a better user experience, increase engagement, benefit…
The Jetpack team has been quietly testing a new plugin called Jetpack Boost, which addresses website owners’ performance and SEO concerns. Version 1.0 was released today, one month after the final pre-release came out in March. Boost is a separate plugin under the Jetpack brand and it does not require Jetpack core to work. The…
Just a day after launching its new privacy-first web analytics product last week, Cloudflare announced Automatic Platform Optimization (APO) for WordPress. The new service boasts staggering performance improvements for sites that might otherwise be slowed down by shared hosting, slow database lookups, or sluggish plugins: Our testing… showed a 72% reduction in Time to First…
WordPress 5.0.1 was released yesterday as a security release with fixes for seven vulnerabilities that were privately disclosed. It includes a few breaks in backwards compatibility that plugin developers will want to review. WordPress 5.0.2 will be the first planned followup release to 5.0 and is now scheduled to be released December 19, 2018. Gary…
Milan Dinić, a WordPress developer based in Serbia, has released his commonWP plugin that enables WordPress sites to use the free, public jsDelivr CDN. Last year jsDelivr was revamped to allow any file from GitHub and npm to be served by the CDN. WordPress’ mirror on GitHub made it possible for Dinić to create a…