To run benchmarks comparing one WordPress release with another, you need to set up a fork of https://github.com/swissspidy/compare-wp-performance in your own GitHubGitHub GitHub 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/ account (or ask for collaborator access).
Follow these steps to run the benchmarks for a WordPress CoreCore Core is the set of software required to run WordPress. The Core Development Team builds WordPress. release:
- Ensure your fork is up to date with the latest
mainbranch from https://github.com/swissspidy/compare-wp-performance. - In your fork on GitHub, go to the “Actions” tab and select the “Benchmark” workflow.
- Click “Run workflow” and configure the settings:
- For the title, you can use any text you like or leave it empty.
- For the old version to compare, stick to the default of “latest”.
- For the new version to compare, provide the URLURL A specific web address of a website or web page on the Internet, such as a website’s URL www.wordpress.org to the production build of the respective version’s ZIP file, e.g.
https://wordpress.org/wordpress-6.8-RC3.zip. - For the theme to test, you’ll want to at least run the workflow in two configurations, one time using the latest blockBlock Block 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. theme and another time using the latest classic theme. Feel free to do additional workflow runs with the other selectable themes for even more comprehensive benchmark results.
Once all workflow runs for the benchmarks have completed, you’ll find a Markdown summary posted under the workflow’s “Summary” navigation item.
To share the metrics in a more presentable way and to ensure they don’t get lost in time, create a new public spreadsheet. For each workflow run using a different theme, create two tabs, one for the Web Vitals metrics and another one for the Server Timing metrics.
As an example, here is the reference benchmarks spreadsheet for the WordPress 6.8 release.
