Performance Lab
Performance Lab plugin updates are released monthly on the third Monday of the month.
April’s release 2.3.0 includes further enhancements to creating stand-alone plugins as well as some small bug fixes.
The second 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, Fetchpriority has been approved by the WordPress plugin team, awaiting approval of Dominant Color Images.
The Performance Lab plugin has also reached 70k active installations this month!
Proposals and Discussion
Performance Team chats are held weekly on Tuesdays; check https://make.wordpress.org/meetings/ for current time.
A PR has been created for the work against enhancing the Scripts API with a loading strategy. The focus in May has been on addressing initial feedback which has mainly been completed. There are some final decisions to make around handling deferred and async dependencies, and inline scripts attached to defer/async scripts.
The Plugin Checker engineering of the infrastructure, admin screens and 2 initial checks has been completed. May’s focus has been around final iterations following the architectural code review, QA testing. Progress can be seen in this GitHub repo, which eventually should be transferred to the WordPress organization.
A blog post was published outlining the WordPress 6.2 server performance analysis summary to identify the biggest opportunities to target for future performance enhancements, from which a notable inclusion has already landed for 6.3 #58394 resulting in ~7% faster 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. themes and 2% faster classic themes (full results).
Last week saw the ‘More accurate lazy-loading’ work committed. Related to this, great progress has been made on adding fetchpriority support against #58235 in this pull request.
Additional work across the team has seen Several new TracTrac Trac is the place where contributors create issues for bugs or feature requests much like GitHub.https://core.trac.wordpress.org/. tickets have been created for improving the automated performance testing workflow that was introduced in the WP 6.2 release cycle (#58358, #58359 and #58360).
Tickets
In addition to Performance Lab, the Performance Team also works on performance-related tickets in coreCore Core is the set of software required to run WordPress. The Core Development Team builds WordPress. and holds a fortnightly Bug Bash on Wednesdays; check https://make.wordpress.org/meetings/ for current time.
In the last two weeks, several fixes for more accurate lazy-loading were committed to WordPress core. Here are all the commits and tickets:
- [55816] (see #58213)
- [55821] (see #58212)
- [55825] (see #58089)
- [55847] (see #58211)
- [55850] (see #56588)
The WordPress core pull request mentioned last month, to enhance get_block_templates() performance was committed, and improves overall server response time for sites using a block theme by a significant ~15%.
Some initial improvements to translations have already been applied ahead of a broader performance initiative for translated sites (#58321 and #58317).
Additional improvements have been committed around lazy loading metaMeta Meta is a term that refers to the inside workings of a group. For us, this is the team that works on internal WordPress sites like WordCamp Central and Make WordPress. data #58185, #5780, #57701, and #58230.
Work continues on #58394 for the performance of wp_maybe_inline_styles ahead of the 6,3 release. The work here demonstrates a significant performance improvement for block themes (~7% faster) and for classic themes (~2% faster).
The team is heavily working on further performance tickets prioritized for the upcoming 6.3 release.