The WordPress coreCoreCore is the set of software required to run WordPress. The Core Development Team builds WordPress. development team builds WordPress! Follow this site for general updates, status reports, and the occasional code debate. There’s lots of ways to contribute:
Found a bugbugA 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.?Create a ticket in the bug tracker.
Review of WordPress performance improvements throughout 2024
Breaking down CoreCoreCore 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 APIAPIAn 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.
Please click the image above to view the slide deck
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 pluginPluginA 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 TracTracAn open source project by Edgewall Software that serves as a bug tracker and project management tool for WordPress.ticketticketCreated 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.
At a high level, we went through the following agenda:
Quick intros (what each person does/focuses on)
Review of WordPress performance improvements throughout 2023
Retrospective sharing field data for the cumulative performance impact of the team’s work in 2023
Discussion around interpretation of metrics
A look ahead to 2024 plans
As a reminder, hallway hangouts are meant to be casual and collaborative so folks came prepared with a kind, curious mind along with any questions or items they wanted to discuss around this important area of the project, especially since the agenda was intentionally loose to allow for it.
Please click the image above to view the slide deck
INP Discussion
@adamsilverstein@flixos90@pbearne were discussing whether INP mobile scores are due to lower powered mobile devices. The team discussed whether there may be an answer we can find. Mobile passing rate is more of a problem with INP (high chance it’s because of low powered devices). It could be networknetwork(versus site, blog) conditions as well, but lower powered devices likely to be the cause. @pbearne did raise: what would be the fix, low res images? How could we support under-powered devices? @flixos90 commented that for INP specifically it’s about JavaScriptJavaScriptJavaScript or JS is an object-oriented computer programming language commonly used to create interactive effects within web browsers. WordPress makes extensive use of JS for a better user experience. While PHP is executed on the server, JS executes within a user’s browser. https://www.javascript.com/.. The amount, and how it’s executed, i.e. using a worker thread comes to mind that can improve INP. WordPress doesn’t have support for worker thread. This could be a good opportunity. More about the actual JSJSJavaScript, a web scripting language typically executed in the browser. Often used for advanced user interfaces and behaviors. code, reduction of JS code and optimizing JS code.
It was suggested that the PluginPluginA 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 Checker tool could help with? Are there any optimization tools to help here? General consensus is that folks are just not sure. @adamsilverstein mentioned that it’s not just static analysis, these INP issues don’t tend to come up, it’s more in the field when there’s a lot of JS interacting on the page simultaneously. Complicated layouts also contribute to low INP, DOM layouts — but unsure if this is our problem. Maybe likely to be in the front end, themes. Also in the combination of things, animations, app providers, tracking etc, these things add up and compete for resources on a low powered device. @westonruter shared How to diagnose slow INP in the lab: https://web.dev/articles/manually-diagnose-slow-interactions-in-the-lab.
@flixos90 highlighted the Interactivity APIAPIAn 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. (very new and not publicly available) this is the first WP coreCoreCore is the set of software required to run WordPress. The Core Development Team builds WordPress. own JS API that is just starting to be rolled out. This would allow plugins to use an API allowed by core, htmlHTMLHyperText Markup Language. The semantic scripting language primarily used for outputting content in web browsers. directives, could we improve INP through the interactivity API — great potential opportunity for the future. Static analysis in the plugin checker, could look to pointing plugin checker to interactivity API. Prevalence of cookie consent policies, are these contributing to low INP scores? The team feel this is potentially low hanging fruit as 90% of sites need one now.
@joemcgill mentioned the tricky part here is the big services that provide cookie consent provide their own JS code to drop in the page, integrations would be more challenging. @pbearne mentioned a simple basic one that works would be great. Could it be done in a way where you don’t get penalized in the stats. The team agree this is worth looking into. @pbearne asked if this could this be the case of analyzing the top 20 cookie consent plugins and see if they can be made into a canonical plugin and build from the ground up? However the potentially, tricky thing is building something into core will require extensibility similar to how the privacy policy feature was built, driven by legal requirements that are different in all places. If the extensibility is made too flexible, it may cause more INP problems.
Cost Analysis
@pbearne highlighted that there’s no tie back to numbers, costs etc in the presentation from @flixos90 — cost of search engines crawling the save in value, cost saving of hosting companies etc — wondered if there’s a way we can obtain any dollar values against what these performance improvements actually mean. @flixos90 advised that we can try to draw general conclusions but mostly to get real numbers is do individual case studies, maybe there are hosting providers that are happy to share how much LCP improved and what this means for revenue / cost, specific case studies would be the way forward here, it would be difficult to establish this more widely. Maybe there’s a call we can put out to ask any hosting providers if they’re willing to do a case study
TTFB Improvements
@joemcgill went on to discuss the second to last slide, idea that we can get more benefit from focusing on FE LCP improvements, the underlying TTFB improvements — this was Joe’s initial gut instinct, websites that care about performance fix TTFB by not hitting WP application at all, using aggressive page caching etc. However, mindful at the fact that WP 6.3 we had 2 big opportunities that had a big impact on client slide: removal of emoji loading script and image loading improvements (the addition of fetchpriority and the lazy loading improvements). Whilst focusing on FE LCP improvements are easier, do we have opportunities of similar scale that would make sense, or are we just driving server side?
@flixos90 added that the difference is that most of client side improvements that we have done are larger efforts, whereas improving server side cut off milliseconds that add up over time. There may be a point where we have no idea what to improve on the client side, but there are a few things mentioned on image sizes attribute is one of them, optimizing how large images are loaded, continuing to optimize fetchpriority and lazy loading are applied, will drive up the passing rate more. Felix added, the main indicator is when we look at mobile, this is where the big difference is happening, when you look at LCP and TTFB together, but LCP in 6.3 was a lot more (probably came from client side improvements predominantly). Desktop TTFB was more visible than mobile. We always benchmark on a desktop machine, so mobile devices are lower powered. Maybe it’s just because for mobile specifically TTFB improvements have a lower role, and it’s more about the device configuration.
@joemcgill went on to ask whether we’re just looking at the % that are getting good scores, rather than the value of TTFB or change in TTFB metric. Could we have made the same amount of improvement as desktop, but not a big enough value to go over the threshold of the passing rate. Felix mentioned he has looked at these numbers as he has assumed the same thing. When you look at aggregated data, there weren’t major improvements in similar ways. Overall scale is still not visible.
2024 Suggestions
@pbearne suggested images, do the amounts of images in the media library impact going through file numbers, orphan image sizes left around — should we have a tool to help clean this up? Some images are left behind from changing themes etc, does this bloat the number of images in the file system? If it does, would a simple tool help remove images that are not current. Here, @adamsilverstein suggested that some regenerate thumbnails plugins, URLs still point to old images if they’re removed. Thinks everyone has things in folders, if people have them in one giant directory it would impact. File loading may not be an image, but one place to look at was maybe the attachments in posts database, when doing lookups etc, maybe there are places we can eliminate here — but suspect this is a small improvement. The remaining images are mostly about storage space wasted and incurring costs. For performance on end users, doubt this has a notable impact.
@pbearne also added that the interactivity API would be a great place to investigate. @flixos90 added we should think for next year what can we do to improve interactivity, facilitate WP sites having more responsive interactions. The new metrics means this is more significant. Load time performance, but split this more to cover interactivity. The team discussed any other intentional research what leads to lower INP passing rate, hypotheses have been created but could do with having confidence in knowing where the problems lie. More research is definitely needed.
@flixos90 continued, what do the TTFB numbers mean for us? This year we have been focused on improving TTFB in core, but thinking about mobile representation, are there other ways we should try to move forward TTFB — what about enhancing APIs to provide more guardrails to plugins, there are a lot of other components to this, could argue that small changes don’t cover lower powered — something core can do better to facilitate caching for more people. Can we unlock caching for sites that have hosts that don’t provide this feature etc. @joemcgill added that we had talked about trying to use the SQLite Database as an object cache for sites that don’t have a better option — could we think on this again?
@flixos90 liked this idea, worth exploring — this would be for object caching, could we use it for page caching? Persistent object cache avoids using database requests, not that significant for overall performance. Full page caching would be more beneficial to focus on. Avoiding hitting application altogether could be better. Was looking at full page caching in the CWV dashboard, surprised that the popular caching plugins their TTFB scores are not beating the general WP TTFB numbers, seems counter intuitive. Could we dive into this more? Were these plugins specific to having the full page caching, could not be turned on. @adamsilverstein added that we can get a geographical bias, if the plugin is popular in a region with slower internet, it’s not their problem its the users. @adamsilverstein highlighted that you can breakdown on the settings page of the CWV report by geographical region. Could query this in HTTPHTTPHTTP is an acronym for Hyper Text Transfer Protocol. HTTP is the underlying protocol used by the World Wide Web and this protocol defines how messages are formatted and transmitted, and what actions Web servers and browsers should take in response to various commands. Archive to see if there are patterns. Other considerations are all WP plugins that offer full page caching offer this at the application level, not as good as having the layer at the hosting level.
Concluding Statements
@pbearne raised that as a plugin developer, having good tests or validations that I’m doing it right, i.e. plugin checker, improving this and helping you recognise where improvements should be made, is something that can improve overall performance. More work in this field would benefit overall, especially if we can do themes as well.
@joemcgill concluded that the team are thankful to Felix for pulling these numbers together, easy to not be able to see the big picture. But really great to see the impact the performance team has made is great to see!
Props to @joemcgill for proof-reading and to @flixos90 for the excellent presentation.
This hallway hangout is a continuation of prior hallway hangouts in the FSE Outreach Program about release specific updates. In this session, we’ll talk through some of what’s to come in the next WordPress release with a proposed schedule for March 26th. This is being shared early to help encourage more folks to tune in and to build some excitement for this next release.
How to join
If you’re interested in joining, the Hallway Hangout will happen on 2024-01-16 21:00 . A Zoom link will be shared in the core-editorSlackSlackSlack 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 and all are welcome to join, whether to listen or participate, for as long or as little as you’d like. This will be recorded and recapped.
Agenda
At a high level, expect this to take the form of a free flowing demo/presentation going through as many release priorities as possible. @annezazu and @saxonafletcher will take point to demo and share what’s being worked on. Others might jump in to share as well depending on the roadmap post for 6.5 and where work stands by that point in the release cycle.
As a reminder, hallway hangouts are meant to be casual and collaborative so come prepared with a kind, curious mind. Depending on how large the session is, we may not get to all questions live on the call but we can always include follow up in the recap.
This is a summary of a Hallway Hangout that was wrangled in the #accessibility channel after a prior hallway hangout on improving accessibilityAccessibilityAccessibility (commonly shortened to a11y) refers to the design of products, devices, services, or environments for people with disabilities. The concept of accessible design ensures both “direct access” (i.e. unassisted) and “indirect access” meaning compatibility with a person’s assistive technology (for example, computer screen readers). (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accessibility) in the Site Editor and took the new form of a concrete working session to address a specific problem. It was first announced on October 1st and was open to all.
To kick off, Joe asked Alex to talk through the current pain points and differences between modes. As Alex said, navigation mode is a hackedhacked together feature. The biggest problem we have, the navigation mode is a dynamically updating button. Everytime you press your arrow key or tab key when you’re in navigation mode, it dynamically re-renders. This is a challenging problem to handle with screen readers because it’ll ignore this. For Windows, there’s also a longstanding issue where the arrow keys don’t actually send the keyboard events through the browser so tab is the only viable key. Conversely, List View is much simpler in the way you can navigate with keys and it’s wrapped in a navigation role. You are able to expand rows, have control over what you’re looking at, etc. Another current problem with navigation mode, it’s not entirely clear when there are inner blocks. Alex started to work on this but stopped to focus on list view.
What are the consequences if we stripped out navigation mode and used list view as the primary way of browsing through blocks?
To date, there has been no modal, tips, etc for keyboard users in the editor. People who are used to this would have no idea it has changed and we need a way to communicate that change, perhaps using a similar approach to the change in template parts to the patterns section.
Andrea, who helped implement navigation mode, offered some historical context. He shared that if we are going to use navigation mode, we’re going to reintroduce a major issue that existed before introducing the two modes. Imagine that a post contains dozens of blocks. If you want to navigate these blocks in the post content area with the tab key, you are going to have to go through all of the dozens of blocks including the interface of each blockBlockBlock is the abstract term used to describe units of markup that, composed together, form the content or layout of a webpage using the WordPress editor. The idea combines concepts of what in the past may have achieved with shortcodes, custom HTML, and embed discovery into a single consistent API and user experience. (dozens of tab stops). Nav mode was originally meant to reduce the number of tab stops when navigating through the blocks in a way that each block was only one tab stop rather than multiple then pressing enter gives the ability to switch the block to edit mode where you can navigate inside the block. This was the original implementation and it made sense when there were no inner blocks.
Joe noted that List View works the same way where you can go block to block. When you use the tab key you are going through all of these elements. However, there are still a lot fewer elements than going through the blocks themselves. We should be willing to compromise to some degree. Arrow key navigation in List View also does work. It’s 100% accessibility and there are a total of three tabbable elements in list view: tab panel, close button, and list view area itself.
Alex would like to find a better way to manage focus between block editor and block sidebarSidebarA sidebar in WordPress is referred to a widget-ready area used by WordPress themes to display information that is not a part of the main content. It is not always a vertical column on the side. It can be a horizontal rectangle below or above the content area, footer, header, or any where in the theme. but that’s a broader discussion. Jerry and Alex have worked on this but it’s a long battle.
Trying List View + Focus Mode for container blocks as an experiment
Anne pitched trying getting rid of navigation mode and use list view + focus mode as an experiment in GutenbergGutenbergThe 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/. We could then do a call for testing and get a sense of what the experience might be like more practically. Folks were very much onboard with trying this out, especially since in the long run this would reduce the number of mechanisms to maintain.
The question of how many people are used to using navigation mode came up though, especially since the feedback folks are worried about is more about non screen reader users. Anne is going to try to get some initial data from WordPress.comWordPress.comAn online implementation of WordPress code that lets you immediately access a new WordPress environment to publish your content. WordPress.com is a private company owned by Automattic that hosts the largest multisite in the world. This is arguably the best place to start blogging if you have never touched WordPress before. https://wordpress.com/.
Mobile concerns
Rich chimed in that the current primary use for that view is on mobile devices as this makes it easier to select child first nested blocks so it’s easy to tap onto. We never really got to the bottom of this on the call as we all pulled out our phones to investigate and couldn’t figure out how to even evoke the mode.
Locked blocks and inert
We discussed how to explain disabled blocks in List View which relates to a broader discussion on alternatives to inert. There’s no good way to explain to a blind user what a template looks like when editing a smaller portion like a page. Anne showed an option to toggle on/off a template preview when editing a page in the Site Editor and we discussed a few ways we could enhance that feature to save it as a preference/have it be persistent in some way.
Focus mode concerns
We discussed Focus Mode and adding it to Container Blocks. A big piece to figure out is how the back button works and ensuring it returns you to where you’d expect in the Site Editor experience.
Gutenberg as a framework concerns
Alex brought up an excellent point around Gutenberg being used as a framework, like with Blocks Everywhere, and how navigation mode is built into it as a package. We need to consider this in removing the navigation mode and it might be that it remains for third party usage.
To provide context, when navigation and edit mode were initially introduced in GutenbergGutenbergThe 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/ 6.3, nested blocks and the Site Editor did not exist. We now face the challenge of finding a more efficient way to navigate between content.
If you’re interested in joining, the Hallway Hangout will happen on 2023-11-15 16:00. A Zoom link will be shared in the #accessibilitySlackSlackSlack 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 and all are welcome to join, whether to listen or participate, for as long or as little as you’d like.
Agenda
At a high level, we’ll start with some intros to get familiar with who has joined us on the call before diving into the topic in practical terms: How does everything work today? How might deprecation work? What accessibilityAccessibilityAccessibility (commonly shortened to a11y) refers to the design of products, devices, services, or environments for people with disabilities. The concept of accessible design ensures both “direct access” (i.e. unassisted) and “indirect access” meaning compatibility with a person’s assistive technology (for example, computer screen readers). (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accessibility) improvements or fixes are needed for this to be viable?
As a reminder, hallway hangouts are meant to be casual and collaborative so come prepared with a kind, curious mind. Because this will be more of a working session, we’ll be solely focused on the topic prepared so please keep that in mind when considering whether to join.
At a high level, we will go through quick intros (what each person does/focuses on) before reviewing WordPress 6.3 performance impact in the field, diving into WordPress 6.4 performance improvements and looking ahead at what can be learned for WordPress 6.5.
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.
During the call, @joemcgill discussed the benchmark results from WordPress 6.4 where we have identified good improvements for classic themes in particular, and a hypothesis for where those improvements came from was discussed. Currently, it’s difficult to identify where the improvements to classic themes in WordPress 6.4 comes from, but the team are planning to spend additional time investigating this.
@adamsilverstein discussed whether we can start to identify these differences using automated testing, but the variance is difficult to assess. @adamsilverstein suggested having the data in Opentelemetry or Grafana where you can map a trendline with all the data. However, the set up that you use for testing makes a large difference to results.
@flixos90 mentioned that the old approach for benchmarking provided different results compared to the new approach. @joemcgill discussed important considerations for benchmarking, saying that lab results are instructive, however this does not necessarily translate to what we see in the field. @pbearne suggested a query string switch and for people to disable a range of variables, and potentially we could build in A/B testing, this could be a headerHeaderThe 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.. This could point towards a third method, lab in the field benchmarking!
@flixos90 shared this spreadsheet where benchmarks were compared from previous WordPress versions to WordPress 6.4, as we know so far. This contains only one negative number which is a great result! The results from the GitHubGitHubGitHub is a website that offers online implementation of git repositories that can easily be shared, copied and modified by other developers. Public repositories are free to host, private repositories require a paid subscription. GitHub introduced the concept of the ‘pull request’ where code changes done in branches by contributors can be reviewed and discussed before being merged be the repository owner. https://github.com/ actions workflow built by @swissspidy are relatively consistent. @pbearne discussed diminished returns as we do the benchmarks, and discussed how best we set expectations around these improvements.
@flixos90 one thing the performance team needs to work on is consistency in benchmarks. The WordPress 6.3 in the field post was discussed. It was great to see lazy loading and fetchpriority contributed to these improvement and improvements to LCP were discussed. The CWV tech report which looks at overall WordPress, using all sites that are listed in the httpHTTPHTTP is an acronym for Hyper Text Transfer Protocol. HTTP is the underlying protocol used by the World Wide Web and this protocol defines how messages are formatted and transmitted, and what actions Web servers and browsers should take in response to various commands. archive dataset, was also shared and discussed at length. Between July this year, and September this year, the CWV passing rate went from 39% to 41.5% passing rate which is a significant improvement in a short space of time.
Performance dev notesdev noteEach important change in WordPress Core is documented in a developers note, (usually called dev note). Good dev notes generally include a description of the change, the decision that led to this change, and a description of how developers are supposed to work with that change. Dev notes are published on Make/Core blog during the beta phase of WordPress release cycle. Publishing dev notes is particularly important when plugin/theme authors and WordPress developers need to be aware of those changes.In general, all dev notes are compiled into a Field Guide at the beginning of the release candidate phase. for WordPress 6.4
@joemcgill took us through some upcoming improvements for WordPress 6.5, including:
Sever Timing
Performant translations pluginPluginA 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 (see #59656)
BlockBlockBlock is the abstract term used to describe units of markup that, composed together, form the content or layout of a webpage using the WordPress editor. The idea combines concepts of what in the past may have achieved with shortcodes, custom HTML, and embed discovery into a single consistent API and user experience.HooksHooksIn WordPress theme and development, hooks are functions that can be applied to an action or a Filter in WordPress. Actions are functions performed when a certain event occurs in WordPress. Filters allow you to modify certain functions. Arguments used to hook both filters and actions look the same. follow-up
Review Fonts APIAPIAn 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.
Image optimizations
Better sizes calculations (to be completed after 6.5)
Next month, @greenshady, @welcher, and I will host a casual conversation about the most important and exciting developer-related changes coming soon in WordPress 6.4. From BlockBlockBlock is the abstract term used to describe units of markup that, composed together, form the content or layout of a webpage using the WordPress editor. The idea combines concepts of what in the past may have achieved with shortcodes, custom HTML, and embed discovery into a single consistent API and user experience.HooksHooksIn WordPress theme and development, hooks are functions that can be applied to an action or a Filter in WordPress. Actions are functions performed when a certain event occurs in WordPress. Filters allow you to modify certain functions. Arguments used to hook both filters and actions look the same. and the Font Library to improved Editor flows and the new Twenty Twenty-Four theme, there is just so much to talk about.
The Hangout will begin with a brief overview of the major changes, and then we’ll open it up for group discussion and Q&A.
This event will be held on Thursday, October 12, 2023, at 1:00 PM CST (18:00 UTC), which is right before WordPress 6.4 RC1. The meeting link will be shared through the Learn WordPress MeetupMeetupAll local/regional gatherings that are officially a part of the WordPress world but are not WordCamps are organized through https://www.meetup.com/. A meetup is typically a chance for local WordPress users to get together and share new ideas and seek help from one another. Searching for ‘WordPress’ on meetup.com will help you find options in your area. group. RSVP for the event to access the link. We hope to see you there!
Interactivity APIAPIAn 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. powered features:
Query LoopLoopThe Loop is PHP code used by WordPress to display posts. Using The Loop, WordPress processes each post to be displayed on the current page, and formats it according to how it matches specified criteria within The Loop tags. Any HTML or PHP code in the Loop will be processed on each post. https://codex.wordpress.org/The_Loop. Block (53812)
To ensure the Site Editor can be used by everyone, this hallway hangout aims to dive deep into the current accessibilityAccessibilityAccessibility (commonly shortened to a11y) refers to the design of products, devices, services, or environments for people with disabilities. The concept of accessible design ensures both “direct access” (i.e. unassisted) and “indirect access” meaning compatibility with a person’s assistive technology (for example, computer screen readers). (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accessibility) of this new experience with the aim to iterate and improve.
How to join
If you’re interested in joining, the Hallway Hangout will happen on 2023-09-14 15:00. A Zoom link will be shared in the #accessibilitySlackSlackSlack 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 and all are welcome to join, whether to listen or participate, for as long or as little as you’d like.
Agenda
At a high level, we’ll go through the following:
Quick intros.
Discussions around current concerns.
Demos of pain points from @alexstine and @joedolson.
Discussion about ways to resolve/address current, known issues.
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. Outside of the time for demos, we’ll intentionally have space for open discussion.
Join Ryan Welcher (@welcher) and me next month for a casual conversation about blockBlockBlock is the abstract term used to describe units of markup that, composed together, form the content or layout of a webpage using the WordPress editor. The idea combines concepts of what in the past may have achieved with shortcodes, custom HTML, and embed discovery into a single consistent API and user experience. variations and how you can use them to enhance the editing experience in WordPress. An often overlooked feature, variations are a great way to extend existing blocks and can be as simple or complex as you like. Many WordPress CoreCoreCore is the set of software required to run WordPress. The Core Development Team builds WordPress. blocks you use daily are variations!
To kick off the discussion, we will provide a brief overview of what variations are and how they work. Ryan will then share how he built the Advanced Query LooppluginPluginA 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 why he opted for a variation of the Query block instead of building a custom block from scratch. And if you have built any variations or are using them in interesting ways, we encourage you to share them with the group.
While block variations tend to be a more developer-focused topic, this Hallway Hangout will be accessible to everyone. The event will be held on Thursday, September 14, 2023, at 1:00 PM CST (18:00 UTC). The meeting link will be shared through the Learn WordPress MeetupMeetupAll local/regional gatherings that are officially a part of the WordPress world but are not WordCamps are organized through https://www.meetup.com/. A meetup is typically a chance for local WordPress users to get together and share new ideas and seek help from one another. Searching for ‘WordPress’ on meetup.com will help you find options in your area. group. RSVP for the event to access the link.
Recording
Notes
The Hallway Hangout was attended by 34 community members, including facilitators @ndiego and @welcher.
Nick gave a brief overview of what Block Variations are and how to use them. Ryan then discussed how and why you might want to build more advanced variations and demoed his Advanced Query LoopLoopThe Loop is PHP code used by WordPress to display posts. Using The Loop, WordPress processes each post to be displayed on the current page, and formats it according to how it matches specified criteria within The Loop tags. Any HTML or PHP code in the Loop will be processed on each post. https://codex.wordpress.org/The_Loop. plugin. Questions were asked and answered throughout. The following resources were shared during the event:
The code reference for all Core blocks and their attributes.
The GitHubGitHubGitHub is a website that offers online implementation of git repositories that can easily be shared, copied and modified by other developers. Public repositories are free to host, private repositories require a paid subscription. GitHub introduced the concept of the ‘pull request’ where code changes done in branches by contributors can be reviewed and discussed before being merged be the repository owner. https://github.com/repository for the Advanced Query Loop plugin.
At a high level, we’ll go through quick intros (what each person does/focuses on) before diving into WordPress 6.3 performance improvements led by performance leads (@clarkeemily@flixos90) and looking ahead at what can be learned for WordPress 6.4. Here’s a preview from the 6.3 beta 2 post:
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.
After a round of intros for anyone who wanted to participate, we jumped into the following discussions.
Overview of 6.3 performance improvements
@flixos90 discussed an in-progress post rounding up performance improvements for 6.3, highlighting that thus far performance improvements are looking even better than for 6.2. Here are some quick stats from 6.3 RC2 shared yesterday:
LCP for blockBlockBlock is the abstract term used to describe units of markup that, composed together, form the content or layout of a webpage using the WordPress editor. The idea combines concepts of what in the past may have achieved with shortcodes, custom HTML, and embed discovery into a single consistent API and user experience. themes ~28% faster than 6.2.2
TTFB ~22% faster
LCP-TTFB ~37% faster
LCP for classic themes ~19% faster than 6.2.2
TTFB ~1% slower
LCP-TTFB ~30% faster
We also went through the following dev notesdev noteEach important change in WordPress Core is documented in a developers note, (usually called dev note). Good dev notes generally include a description of the change, the decision that led to this change, and a description of how developers are supposed to work with that change. Dev notes are published on Make/Core blog during the beta phase of WordPress release cycle. Publishing dev notes is particularly important when plugin/theme authors and WordPress developers need to be aware of those changes.In general, all dev notes are compiled into a Field Guide at the beginning of the release candidate phase.:
As part of the above item, it’s important to note that dependencies for larger plugins are handled with care, opting for the more conservative pathway if broader extensions of a larger pluginPluginA 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 haven’t opted this approach when the overall plugin has. If both switch, this new approach will be used. While not a performance enhancementenhancementEnhancements are simple improvements to WordPress, such as the addition of a hook, a new feature, or an improvement to an existing feature. out of the box using WordPress since it requires adoption, it is an important item to cover to ensure folks see how they can put it to use. As part of this, we discussed both Delay loading comment-reply script with async loading strategy and Use defer loading strategy for frontend view scripts with the latter already merged to improve loading performance for frontend scripts in WordPress itself. More here:
Now that we have Script Loading Strategies committed, I’ve started exploring how we can take advantage of them to improve frontend performance in coreCoreCore is the set of software required to run WordPress. The Core Development Team builds WordPress./themes/plugins. As a first step, I wanted to try one set of enhancements to see what is involved and what the impact is to see whether the effort is worth it. As an initial exploration, I focused on the scripts that GutenbergGutenbergThe 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/ adds to the frontend, that is the block view scripts. These are unfortunately all added to the head and are all blocking. So opened a PR to leverage async and defer, and my findings a 19.3% reduction in LCP-TTFB! https://github.com/WordPress/gutenberg/pull/52536#:~:text=Performance%20Analysis
Sparked by a question from @oandregal about when should we expect the improvements landed in 6.2 and 6.3 to impact RUM public datasets, we dug into data to see the impact of changes. André later shared a personal post on the topic! For context, lab data is what improvements we expect to see in a more contained environment where as field data is what we end up seeing on real sites. A note from Felix that we always have to wait at least a month after a new release to get a first set of metrics from the Chrome UX Report & HTTP Archive. To help aid digging into data, block theme detection was added to the HTTP archive a few months ago.
As discussed, the key is to pull tendencies as it’s hard to get absolutely exact data. Right now, the tendencies validates lab assumptions when looking into the field data! We went through reports both in Chrome UX Report data and Core Web vitals for TTFB:
Of note, data in CrUX is added at aggregate level and it’s not weighted by number of pages so a site with tons of pages is equally weighted for one with none. For Core Web Vitals, it shows a steady increase since April and it shows that we can look for delayed impacts for 6.3 in September/October to see how changes are landing.
Discussion around PHP backports to Core
We ended talking about backports to Core and the impact on performance as the the current performance process involves analyzing the previous state of WordPress versions to identify opportunities for improvement, implementing those improvements, and validating their effectiveness. The performance team wants to be more proactive and involved in looking ahead at work to come to ensure that WordPress remains performant, particularly with new features like duotone functionality being added late in the development cycle. We talked about the efforts from @hellofromtonya to ease the backportbackportA port is when code from one branch (or trunk) is merged into another branch or trunk. Some changes in WordPress point releases are the result of backporting code from trunk to the release branch. process as well as the current time constraints to do so. We have a shorter release cycle for 6.4 so there’s a chance that we can experiment a bit more to see if we can do more frequent package updates.
We discussed the idea of a mid-point merge for PHP backports and a more formal workflow for both Core and Gutenberg teams. The proposal included a “PHP backport party” chat, similar to the release party chats, during the release cycle to facilitate collaboration ideally from more folks. We ended chatting about whether the Core Editor had a dedicated group on performance, explaining that there isn’t a dedicated group so much as a collection of performance-minded individuals within the Gutenberg development.
@hellofromtonya as someone who spends so much time living in this space, I’d love to know what you think here and how myself and @clarkeemily can facilitate as co-members of the 6.4 release squad.
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