Hallway Hangout: Performance End of Year Review 2024

Following up on the prior performance related Hallway Hangout: Performance End of Year Review 2023 in December, @flixos90 @joemcgill and @clarkeemily co-hosted a hallway hangout to review the work and impact of the performance team in 2024, and look ahead to performance improvements in WordPress for 2025.

The Hallway Hangout took place at 2024-12-17 16:00 UTC and the Google Meet link was shared in the #core-performance SlackSlack Slack is a Collaborative Group Chat Platform https://slack.com/. The WordPress community has its own Slack Channel at https://make.wordpress.org/chat/. channel before starting.

At a high level, we went through:

• Review of WordPress performance improvements throughout 2024
• Breaking down CoreCore Core is the set of software required to run WordPress. The Core Development Team builds WordPress. Web Vitals metrics (November 2023 – November 2024) resulting in CWV passing rates increasing by 6.07% on mobile and 5.92% on desktop
• WordPress 2024 releases overview (6.5, 6.6 and 6.7) were discussed individually
• The impact of specific metrics for major features released in 2024 (Enhanced translations engine, 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. and image sizes=auto)
• A look ahead to 2025 plans

As a reminder, hallway hangouts are meant to be casual and collaborative so come prepared with a kind, curious mind along with any questions or items you want to discuss around this important area of the project, especially since the agenda is intentionally loose to allow for it.

Noting this specifically for folks who have expressed interest previously or who are involved directly in this work cc @hellofromtonya @aristath @oandregal @annezazu @illuminea @tweetythierry @desrosj @youknowriad @dmsnell @pbearne @swissspidy @westonruter @adamsilverstein @mukesh27 @joemcgill @johnbillion @linsoftware @spacedmonkey

Recording

Attendees:

@pbearne @joemcgill @benniledl @flixos90 @mukesh27 @mhamal @clarkeemily @b1ink0 @nazmul111 @shyamgadde @kafleg @westonruter @swissspidy @adamsilverstein @annamackenzie

Notes

@flixos90 presented the WordPress Performance 2024 CWV Impact Retrospective slide deck, thank you very much for pulling that together Felix.

TTFB Improvements

@pbearne @flixos90 @joemcgill @westonruter and @adamsilverstein were discussing TTFB passing rates and why the rest of the web has higher rates than WordPress due to that metric. Discussions were held around filtering sites to the top 10k or 100k of sites to re-evaluate passing rates without the bottom end of sites that are not set up correctly. When WordPress is configured correctly, passing rates are much higher, so it was suggested that outreach in the ecosystem may be encouraged to facilitate better hosting environments. The new Core #core-performance-hosting channel will help facilitate these conversations.

The team went on to discuss file caching and the potential to introduce a file caching API in core. It was agreed this would be a very large effort and would need contribution from multiple teams. We would need to revisit the original decision from WordPress to keep file caching in 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 territory as opposed to within Core. We would also need significant investigation into the large number of WordPress sites where static caching is not something their site can support. 

Auto Sizes Metric

The team discussed whether the auto-sizes metric in the slides was the top 70th percentile (it is). 

Plans for 2025

There are still some projects ongoing from 2024 to land, speculative loading now has a TracTrac An open source project by Edgewall Software that serves as a bug tracker and project management tool for WordPress. ticketticket Created for both bug reports and feature development on the bug tracker.. Next steps on responsive image sizes improvements are in progress. The accurate image sizes work. The last piece of dominant colour is going in too! 

Accurate Image sizes

The project @joemcgill and @mukesh27 are focusing on will have significant releases this week, around having more detail on the layout of the page and how we can make more informed choices about accurate image sizes. This essentially takes the layout information of image blocks and cover blocks, but also the constraints of the container around it (group blocks) so we can put limits on the size we expect to show things at. The discussion continued around how we can accurately set image sizes in WordPress. 

Optimization Detective

@westonruter is continuing to work on the optimisation detective plugin which will include prioritisation of background images defined in external file sheets – this will dramatically improve LCP. In the new year he will be continuing to refine the foundation and use cases to hopefully get more adoption and propose for core. @flixos90 reminded the team that this is a great plugin example which improves how well other performance optimisations are applied. It’s important to improve what we already have in core, and this plugin helps that.

Props to @joemcgill for proof reading and @flixos90 for the excellent presentation.

#core-performance, #hallwayhangout, #performance