Call for Testing: Performant Translations

The coreCore Core is the set of software required to run WordPress. The Core Development Team builds WordPress. performance team recently conducted an in-depth i18n performance analysis. It showed that localized WordPress sites load significantly slower than a site without translations. The blogblog (versus network, site) post presented and compared multiple solutions to this problem, and now the team would like to test the most promising approach at a wider scale using a dedicated pluginPlugin A plugin is a piece of software containing a group of functions that can be added to a WordPress website. They can extend functionality or add new features to your WordPress websites. WordPress plugins are written in the PHP programming language and integrate seamlessly with WordPress. These can be free in the WordPress.org Plugin Directory https://wordpress.org/plugins/ or can be cost-based plugin from a third-party.

Introducing the Performant Translations plugin

What it does

The Performant Translations plugin uses a new approach to handle translationtranslation The process (or result) of changing text, words, and display formatting to support another language. Also see localization, internationalization. files in WordPress, making localization blazing fast. The primary purpose of this plugin is to allow broader testing of these enhancements, for which the goal is to eventually land in WordPress core.

This plugin helps to make localized WordPress sites faster by replacing the traditional MO translation files with PHPPHP The web scripting language in which WordPress is primarily architected. WordPress requires PHP 7.4 or higher files, which are much faster to parse. Plus, PHP files can be stored in the so-called OPcache, which provides an additional speed boost.

If your site is using a language other than English (US), you should see immediate speed improvements simply by activating this plugin. No further action is required.

The Performant Translations plugin is available for download on WordPress.orgWordPress.org The community site where WordPress code is created and shared by the users. This is where you can download the source code for WordPress core, plugins and themes as well as the central location for community conversations and organization. https://wordpress.org/ or directly from your WordPress adminadmin (and super admin).

What to test and expect

Since the Performant Translations plugin requires no configuration, all that’s needed to benefit from its speed improvements is to activate the plugin.

To verify that something has changed, you could use a tool like Query Monitor or an external tool for testing server response times. In Query Monitor, the page load time and memory usage should drop quite a bit after plugin activation:

In Query Monitor you will also see how translations are loaded from PHP files from now on:

While the plugin is mostly considered to be a betaBeta A pre-release of software that is given out to a large group of users to trial under real conditions. Beta versions have gone through alpha testing in-house and are generally fairly close in look, feel and function to the final product; however, design changes often occur as part of the process. testing plugin, it has been tested and established to a degree where it should be okay to use in production. Still, as with every plugin, you are doing so at your own risk.

It’s also worth noting that the plugin has been successfully tested with common multilingual plugins, such as WPML, Weglot, TranslatePress, MultilingualPress, and Polylang. It also works fine with Loco Translate and the Preferred Languages feature pluginFeature Plugin A plugin that was created with the intention of eventually being proposed for inclusion in WordPress Core. See Features as Plugins..

Should you choose to stop testing the Performant Translation plugins, uninstalling it will remove all of its traces.

Provide your feedback

If you encounter any issues or simply have questions about the plugin, please leave a comment below or open a new support topic. In addition to that, contributions can be made on GitHub.

The performance team’s goal is to get as much feedback as possible and further refine the approach so that it can ultimately be proposed to be merged into WordPress core 6.5. That means testing will last for a few months at least.

+make.wordpress.org/test/

#call-for-testing, #core, #feature-plugins, #i18n, #needs-testing, #performance