The coreCore Core is the set of software required to run WordPress. The Core Development Team builds WordPress. performance team spent a lot of time this year looking into the performance of the i18ni18n Internationalization, or the act of writing and preparing code to be fully translatable into other languages. Also see localization. Often written with a lowercase i so it is not confused with a lowercase L or the numeral 1. Often an acquired skill./l10nL10n Localization, or the act of translating code into one's own language. Also see internationalization. Often written with an uppercase L so it is not confused with the capital letter i or the numeral 1. WordPress has a capable and dynamic group of polyglots who take WordPress to more than 70 different locales. system in WordPress, after proving that loading translations had a significant hit on response time. This led to an in-depth performance analysis, followed by a dedicated Performant Translations feature pluginFeature Plugin A plugin that was created with the intention of eventually being proposed for inclusion in WordPress Core. See Features as Plugins. offering significant performance boosts for all WordPress sites with zero configuration. Thousands of sites successfully tested the 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 under a wide variety of conditions. Now, the team believes the solution is ready for inclusion in WordPress core.

What it does

Performant Translations is powered by a new, lightweight i18n library that is faster at loading binary MO files and uses less memory. It even supports loading multiple locales at the same time, which makes locale switching faster. In addition to that, it supports translations contained in PHPPHP The web scripting language in which WordPress is primarily architected. WordPress requires PHP 5.6.20 or higher files, avoiding a binary file format and leveraging OPCache if available. If an MO translationtranslation The process (or result) of changing text, words, and display formatting to support another language. Also see localization, internationalization. file has a corresponding PHP file, the latter will be loaded instead, making things even faster and use even less memory. In raw numbers, this is how great the optimization is with this approach:

These numbers were taken by testing the Performant Translations plugin against WordPress 6.5-alpha-57028 with the Twenty Twenty-One theme and a few active plugins. As you can see, memory usage and load time overhead are reduced to a minimum.

Next steps

The core performance team has opened #59656 to track merging Performant Translations into core in time for the next 6.5 release. A pull request is already available and currently undergoing code review. Once that is completed, it will be ready to be merged into trunktrunk A directory in Subversion containing the latest development code in preparation for the next major release cycle. If you are running "trunk", then you are on the latest revision. where the library will be able to see even wider testing.

There is also a Meta patch ready for serving PHP files as part of language packs shipped by translate.wordpress.org, building upon a GlotPress PR. Both are in need of code review right now. While these two changes unlock the full power of Performant Translations, they are not blockers for the core merge and could even land later.

The Performant Translations plugin will continue to be maintained even after a core merge to build on top of the core solution with a distinct additional feature. As is already the case today, the plugin will automatically convert any MO files to PHP files if a PHP file does not currently exist. This is useful for sites where translations are not coming from translate.wordpress.org or only exist locally on that server.

Thank you to @mukesh27, @westonruter for reviewing and helping with this post.

#core, #i18n, #performance