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

Announcements

• Welcome to our new members of #core-performance
• Yesterday (Nov 18) saw the release of:
  • Performance Lab 3.6.0
  • Optimization Detective 0.8.0
  • Modern Image Formats 2.3.0

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 released last week)
  • 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

• @joemcgill It’s not really clear what that release schedule will be yet, but we can already start planning our priorities
• @mukesh27 Tomorrow we have 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. scrub so we can take a look tickets in 6.8 milestone

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
  • Web Worker Offloading

• @westonruter The most recent Optimization Detective release from yesterday has a key change that addresses an under-collection of URLURL A specific web address of a website or web page on the Internet, such as a website’s URL www.wordpress.org Metrics from site visits. However, this change might result in collecting too much (or at least too many attempting to be submitted). So especially for high traffic sites, I’ve opened this issue along with @flixos90 to investigate further: https://github.com/WordPress/performance/issues/1655 Something to monitor this month
• @westonruter For Image Prioritizer, I’ve had this issue on my radar for awhile which tackles a big missing piece for optimizing the LCP element’s background image when it is not defined inline (as is very commonly the case, like in Elementor, Divi, and even older coreCore Core is the set of software required to run WordPress. The Core Development Team builds WordPress. themes’ headerHeader The header of your site is typically the first thing people will experience. The masthead or header art located across the top of your page is part of the look and feel of your website. It can influence a visitor’s opinion about your content and you/ your organization’s brand. It may also look different on different screen sizes. images): https://github.com/WordPress/performance/issues/1584
• @westonruter Relatedly, something which isn’t being optimized at all right now is text, er, fonts. I wrote up a possible plan to implement a new “Text Prioritizer” plugin based on Optimization Detective which I’d love feedback on: https://github.com/WordPress/performance/issues/1313#issuecomment-2460537346
• @adamsilverstein There are probably some other opportunities to optimize fonts as well, so maybe “Font Optimizer“. Thinking about web fallbacks to reduce CLS for example. eg. some of the optimizations from https://github.com/unjs/fontaine look like they could apply in WordPress

Active Priority Projects

• Improving the calculation of image sizes attributes (Joe)
• Enable client side modern image generation (Pascal)
• Enhance onboarding experience for Performance Lab (Felix)

Improving the calculation of image size attributes

• @mukesh27 and @joemcgill are working on defining the scope for https://github.com/WordPress/performance/issues/1511. Soon, we’ll break this larger issue into smaller, more manageable tasks
  • @joemcgill This has been blocked by my not having time to dig into it over the past few weeks, but I should have time this week

Enable Client Side Modern Image Generation

• No updates this week

Enhance Onboarding Experience of Performance Lab Plugin

• @westonruter yesterday’s release included the key improvement to use Ajax to activate performance features rather than full page reloads: https://github.com/WordPress/performance/pull/1646

Open Floor

• @westonruter Last week I learned that content-visibility is now available in all browsers (it is Baseline). This is something else I’m eager to explore implementing with Optimization Detective: https://github.com/WordPress/performance/issues/1308
• @shyamgadde Yesterday, after new versions of some plugins were released, I tried to activate and install them from the Performance Lab settings page. However, the old versions were being installed instead. The issue seems to be that the plugin data, including the version number and download link, were stored in a transient, causing older versions to be downloaded. This behavior doesn’t seem correct. Perhaps when installing or activating a plugin, we should consider bypassing or refreshing the transient to ensure the latest version is used.
  • @mukesh27 requested to open an issue in the performance repo
  • @westonruter The transient shouldn’t be related to the version being installed

Our next chat will be held on Tuesday, November 26, 2024 at 16:00 UTC in the #core-performance channel in Slack.

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