Meeting agenda here and the full chat log is available beginning here on Slack.

Announcements

• Welcome to our new members of #core-performance
• Version 3.3.0 of Performance Lab 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 was released yesterday
• WordPress 6.6 release happening today Tue Jul 16

Priority Items

• WordPress performance TracTrac An open source project by Edgewall Software that serves as a bug tracker and project management tool for WordPress. tickets
  • Current release
  • Future release
• Performance Lab plugin (and other performance plugins)
  • Enhanced Responsive Images
  • Embed Optimizer
  • Image Prioritizer
  • Image Placeholders
  • Modern Image Formats
  • Optimization Detective
  • Performant Translations
  • Speculative Loading
• Active priority projects

WordPress Performance Trac Tickets

• @joemcgill For visibility: on Friday, I reverted r58334 due to a late reported bugbug A bug is an error or unexpected result. Performance improvements, code optimization, and are considered enhancements, not defects. After feature freeze, only bugs are dealt with, with regressions (adverse changes from the previous version) being the highest priority. related to the caching global styles for blocks. This was done as part of #59595. I have a PR that I need to refresh that fixes the issue and reinstates the cache, which I hope to have included in 6.6.1.
• There are currently 12 performance issues in 6.7 which will be reviewed in tomorrow’s bug scrub

Performance Lab Plugin (and other Performance Plugins)

• Performance Lab plugin and the following performance plugins:
  • Enhanced Responsive Images
  • Embed Optimizer
  • Image Prioritizer
  • Image Placeholders
  • Modern Image Formats
  • Optimization Detective (Developer Preview)
  • Performant Translations
  • Speculative Loading

• @mukesh27 I have also opened an issue for the Picture element: The accurate sizes improvement for images not working #1349. The new changes from the Enhanced Responsive Images (formerly known as auto-sizes) plugin are not working
  • @westonruter let’s prioritize fixing those and push out short-cycle standalone releases
  • @mukesh27 confirmed it’s Modern Image formats plugin causing the bug and will share more details on issue

Active Priority Projects

Improving the calculation of image size attributes

• @joemcgill now that we’ve released the first version of Auto-sizes Enhanced Responsive Images that includes those improvements, I think @mukesh27 and I will need to update the overview issue with the main goals for the next priority features. At the same time, we’ll continually iterate on issues that come up during testing.

Improved template loading

• @joemcgill There were a couple of remaining tasks open on the Improved template loading epic, but at this point, we’ve accomplished the majority of what was originally planned and the remaining items really are iterative improvements to the WP_Theme_JSON system that really could be tracked as part of ongoing CoreCore Core is the set of software required to run WordPress. The Core Development Team builds WordPress. work, or as a collaborative issue in the GutenbergGutenberg The Gutenberg project is the new Editor Interface for WordPress. The editor improves the process and experience of creating new content, making writing rich content much simpler. It uses ‘blocks’ to add richness rather than shortcodes, custom HTML etc. https://wordpress.org/gutenberg/ repo, so I’m going to close up the related tickets and close that issue.
• This section will be dropped from the agenda moving forwards

Plugin Check

• @swissspidy there is 1 new performance-related check being worked on that’s ready for code review: https://github.com/WordPress/plugin-check/pull/519. There are more PRs some other contributors are working on, but nothing performance-specific.

Open Floor

• @swissspidy I opened a proposal a while ago for a new PL plugin: https://github.com/WordPress/performance/issues/1324 The idea is to take data collected by Optimization Detective and display them in a nice little dashboard. Not sure yet how useful that would be, but thought I’d share it 🙂
  • @joemcgill I love this idea and wonder if there is an opportunity to surface other kinds of performance data on that dashboard, like CWV scores if available, etc. Though I really like the different use cases we’re finding for the Optimization Detective APIAPI An API or Application Programming Interface is a software intermediary that allows programs to interact with each other and share data in limited, clearly defined ways.. “CWV scores if available” meaning from the CrUX API
    • @westonruter I suppose to compare with the CWV metrics from actual visitors as measured by Optimization Detective?
  • @westonruter Yeah, actually storing the CWV metrics in the URLURL A specific web address of a website or web page on the Internet, such as a website’s URL www.wordpress.org Metrics custom post typeCustom Post Type WordPress can hold and display many different types of content. A single item of such a content is generally called a post, although post is also a specific post type. Custom Post Types gives your site the ability to have templated posts, to simplify the concept. would be a key part of this. Currently we only store which element was the LCP, not what the LCP metric is.
  • @joemcgill Unless we’re collecting metrics from every visit, I think we’d need to somehow be clear about how those CWV metrics are representative of real users, and not a full picture.
  • @westonruter Yeah. It would be a sampling, for sure. But so is CrUX. Although surely CrUX sampling would be higher, assuming you get enough traffic to qualify
  • @joemcgill It is, but CrUX is a larger sample size than what we’re collecting with OD. The real value is that this would allow sites to get URL level data which can be more difficult for site owners to get from CrUX
  • @swissspidy There was also a proposal to use a separate storage mechanism (e.g. a custom table or CPT) that allows storing the data for more than 30 days
  • @swissspidy Precisely. And also without waiting for next month’s data to arrive etc. You could more quickly see the performance impact of changes made to the site.
  • @joemcgill Rather than making this a separate plugin, I really think we should consider adding this type of data to Performance Lab and integrate OD when available (or bundle the API into that plugin too). Now that all of our Performance features are unbundled into standalone plugins, I think there’s an opportunity for PL to add more value as a tool for collecting and surfacing performance metrics and opportunities for improvement to site owners.
• @swissspidy Another quick update from my side: I had some very productive discussions with some Gutenberg folks about client-side media processing and they shared some valuable feedback about separation of concerns. I am currently refactoring my Media Experiments plugin based on that feedback, hoping to have something that can be merged into Gutenberg afterwards. The tracking issue on the Gutenberg repo is this one: https://github.com/WordPress/gutenberg/issues/61447

Our next chat will be held on Tuesday, July 23, 2024 at 15:00 UTC in the #core-performance channel in Slack.

#core-performance, #performance, #performance-chat, #summary