Core Performance Team Update: March 2024

Tickets and contributions

The Performance Team 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 Scrub on Wednesdays; check https://make.wordpress.org/meetings/ for current time.

The Performance Team contributed towards 20 tickets for the upcoming tickets for WordPress 6.5, and are now directing their attention to the 6.6 milestone. Currently there are 2 closed tickets, and 14 tickets that are in progress (see Trac tickets).

INP research opportunities

The Performance Team has been focusing on research around potential INP improvement opportunities across the WordPress Ecosystem, which are now summarized in this summary doc (along with a linked spreadsheet with all the data). If you would like access to the colab and queries, please request it directly in the colab. The Analysis section highlights some notable data for both core and plugins/themes (with action items) that will be worth investigating further. The Performance Team invites the community to leave comments/questions on the document itself so they can be discussed at a subsequent weekly Performance meeting.

Improve template loading

Work continues on several TracTrac Trac is the place where contributors create issues for bugs or feature requests much like GitHub.https://core.trac.wordpress.org/. tickets relating to template loading (see overview issue) including several PRs for #59600 for 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: Use a cache for block template files. 

Additional Plugins

The Performance Team are pleased to announce the two new plugins, Embed Optimizer and Optimization Detective have now been released and are available for installation. The community are invited to please install and test these plugins, and provide feedback. 

Team headlines and updates

Earlier this month, the Performance Team took part in 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://2017.us.wordcamp.org/contributor-day/ https://make.wordpress.org/support/handbook/getting-started/getting-started-at-a-contributor-day/. at WordCampWordCamp WordCamps are casual, locally-organized conferences covering everything related to WordPress. They're one of the places where the WordPress community comes together to teach one another what they’ve learned throughout the year and share the joy. Learn more. Asia where the team not only made contributions to WordPress itself, but most importantly held crucial conversations with other key community members. Adam landed a core Fetch Priority enhancement to the script loader 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. to enable the fetchpriority attribute in the wp_preload_resources filterFilter Filters are one of the two types of Hooks https://codex.wordpress.org/Plugin_API/Hooks. They provide a way for functions to modify data of other functions. They are the counterpart to Actions. Unlike Actions, filters are meant to work in an isolated manner, and should never have side effects such as affecting global variables and output.. Weston met with Elementor Product Lead Shilo Yemini to discuss Optimization Detective and bundling it with Elementor as the solution for identifying and optimizing the LCP elements. Landing this feature in Elementor could be a huge win for their LCP performance and a great way to gather more data for a potential core merge.

At the WordCamp Asia conference itself, Pascal gave a talk on Democratizing Performance and Adam presented a great summary of INP. Both presentations were greatly received by the audience who were really enthusiastic about WordPress performance and the team’s efforts so far.

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

Performance Lab plugin updates are released monthly on the third Monday of the month.

There was no release this month for the Performance Lab plugin as the team are focused on improving the UIUI UI is an acronym for User Interface - the layout of the page the user interacts with. Think ‘how are they doing that’ and less about what they are doing. for the migrationMigration Moving the code, database and media files for a website site from one server to another. Most typically done when changing hosting companies. of modules to plugins (see overview issue) as well as improvements to the user experience of the Performance Lab screen itself, to put the focus on features as opposed to plugins. The team is aiming to launch the new user interface mid-April in the 3.0.0 release.

#core-performance, #performance