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

Announcements

• Welcome to our new members of #core-performance
• Performance Lab 3.4.0 was released yesterday

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 (6.7)
  • Future releases
• 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 (and other performance plugins)
  • Next milestone
• Active priority projects
  • Project board

WordPress Performance Trac Tickets

• There are currently 23 performance issues in 6.7
• @westonruter for #61734 I’d appreciate a second pair of eyes to validate or invalidate my findings for adding fetchpriority=low to the interactivity 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. module scripts. In theory this should improve performance and I swear I saw it did at first, but then I didn’t see improvement but regressionregression A software bug that breaks or degrades something that previously worked. Regressions are often treated as critical bugs or blockers. Recent regressions may be given higher priorities. A "3.6 regression" would be a bug in 3.6 that worked as intended in 3.5.. Please help with my sanity
• @westonruter the auto-sizes ticketticket Created for both bug reports and feature development on the bug tracker. #61847 is still assigned to Future Release – this should be tagged with 6.7 – this has now been completed

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

• @westonruter For Embed Optimizer I’m happy to share I finally got the PR in a workable state to reserve space for embeds to reduce (even entirely eliminate) layout shift. I haven’t yet fleshed out the PR description but I did add a before/after videos: https://github.com/WordPress/performance/pull/1373
• @westonruter Something else I’m excited about is a PR for Image Prioritizer which adds fetchpriority=low to images which are in the initial viewport but which are not visible, such as when they are in subsequent carousel slides: https://github.com/WordPress/performance/pull/1482

Active Priority Projects

Improving the calculation of image size attributes

• @mukesh27 I have been working on the definition for follow-up work to improve the image sizes algorithm. will share more update in upcoming weeks.
  • Develop a system to incorporate layout constraints from ancestor blocks (e.g., group, row, columns, etc) into the sizes calculation.

Plugin Check

• @mukesh27 The next release for Plugin Check version 1.1.0 is ready, with only one issue remaining. You can check the milestone here: Plugin Check Milestone 1.1.0

Open Floor

• @adamsilverstein I have been working on measuring the impact of the features we have been developing by querying public datasets to measure CWV metrics for sites that installed each of our plugins. In my colab, I take each feature (identified by the generator tags we add) and find a set of sites that have enabled that feature. I compare their CWV pass rates to a date before they added the feature, then subtract out the CWV changes from a set of sites that _didn’t_ install the feature.
  • Here is the colab for those curious about the queries – https://gist.github.com/adamsilverstein/20fbb28b6db2c280089b79b9fadb2ca1
  • The results so far show an improvement across the board – https://gist.github.com/adamsilverstein/0aa9fba8fb7685ebf0224df7eb08079b (Changes are absolute percentage changes in pass rates).
  • One caveat is that sites may have installed multiple features/plugins at once and my queries aren’t taking that into account. It would be interesting to see if I can find sites that installed only a single feature to measure the impact in isolation.
• @annezazu Another topic/nudge for open floor: Starting the 6.7 roadmap post and wanted to pingPing The act of sending a very small amount of data to an end point. Ping is used in computer science to illicit a response from a target server to test it’s connection. Ping is also a term used by Slack users to @ someone or send them a direct message (DM). Users might say something along the lines of “Ping me when the meeting starts.” to see what might be on ya’ll’s radar. Can you share there with me?  I see the above Current release (6.7) focus for now.
  • @flixos90 There are probably more items worth including in the roadmap post in https://core.trac.wordpress.org/query?focuses=~performance&milestone=6.7&order=priority, so let’s take a look async and we can share with Anne in the thread
  • Also worth checking whether everything we want to land in 6.7 has a ticket in that list
• @flixos90 just sharing a brief not really performance-related but potentially interesting query result I implemented yesterday: https://github.com/GoogleChromeLabs/wpp-research/pull/150
  This shows that almost 80% of WordPress sites use a “static front pageStatic Front Page A WordPress website can have a dynamic blog-like front page, or a “static front page” which is used to show customized content. Typically this is the first page you see when you visit a site url, like wordpress.org for example.” rather than displaying their “latest posts” on the home page. I believe that’s what most of us would expect in this age, but it begs the question why “latest posts” is still the default for new sites, when it’s only a good default for 20% of sites.

Our next chat will be held on Tuesday, August 27, 2024 at 15:00 UTC in the #core-performance channel in Slack.

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