Performance Chat Summary: 25 August 2026

The full chat log is available beginning here on Slack.

WordPress Performance TracTrac An open source project by Edgewall Software that serves as a bug tracker and project management tool for WordPress. tickets

• @mukesh27 shared a performance 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. found in WordPress 7.1 and reported as #65929 and asked anyone with time to take a look and said any review or feedback would be greatly appreciated.
• @westonruter shared that WCUS Contributor DayContributor Day Contributor Days are standalone days, frequently held before or after WordCamps but they can also happen at any time. They are events where people get together to work on various areas of https://make.wordpress.org/ There are many teams that people can participate in, each with a different focus. https://make.wordpress.org/support/handbook/getting-started/getting-started-at-a-contributor-day/ was formatted like a hackathon this year. His team worked on eliminating script and style concatenation in favor of prefetching scripts and styles likely to be used on the next screen. For example, the login screen prefetches the scripts and styles used on the dashboard, while the dashboard or edit posts list screen prefetches styles used in the post editor. They saw promising performance improvements, including a greater than 70% reduction in LCP when accessing the dashboard from the login screen. The PR #13084 is in progress and ready for early review and testing. He added that the biggest benefit is eliminating script and style concatenation, which is the source of many bugs. In his view, the performance benefit is a bonus.

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)

• @mukesh27 asked @westonruter whether there was a plan for releasing PR #2639.
  • @westonruter re-shared that the PR for the next round of Performance Lab plugin updates is ready for review and testing: PR #2639. ZIPs are available at (comment). He noted that the release includes strict_types, so it warrants extra testing, and also includes several housekeeping changes intended to improve the release process. The PR already has approvals, but he was not sure whether smoke testing had been completed for each build. If that could be done that day, he said he would feel comfortable going ahead with the release

Open Floor

• @westonruter shared that he is coming off a very busy summer of travel and CoreCore Core is the set of software required to run WordPress. The Core Development Team builds WordPress. security work. He is finally back home and can start catching up. His security work will continue, but hopefully at a more managed pace. He noted that there are many PR reviews needed.
• @mukesh27 added that there are also Core commits. @westonruter responded that commits are now cheap, while reviews are hard.

Our next chat will be held on Tuesday, September 8, 2026 at 16:00 UTC in the #core-performance channel in Slack.

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