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 Bash on Wednesdays; check https://make.wordpress.org/meetings/ for current time.

For the upcoming WordPress 6.3 release, the WordPress performance team has been focusing on closing several issues for the 6.3 release.

The Performance Team is happy to be able to report that the PR for #12009 was committed to WordPress core, closing a 13 year old ticket. This is a big milestone for the team, thank you to everyone who contributed to get this across the line. There is still a desire to extend support to inline scripts, so a new ticket has been opened (#58632) for that discussion, and several use-cases for the new 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. across WordPress core and GutenbergGutenberg The 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/ are being discussed.

Additionally, the team is excited to share that we landed fetchpriority=”high” support #58235 in WordPress core. The commit [56037] includes notable refactoring to make the logic that was previously scoped to only lazy-loading more broadly available, as it is also required for fetchpriority. With that refactoring it also unblocks a fix to another issue that still needs to be addressed with lazy-loading: #58635

Both of these performance enhancements will launch as part of the upcoming WordPress 6.3 release.

For raw performance enhancements, 3 major highlights are:

• Emoji loader script causes ~100ms long task #58472 (~20% LCP improvement, committed in [56074])
• Performance issue in register_block_style_handle function #58528 (~30% server response time improvement 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, committed in [56044])
• Improve performance of get_block_templates function #57756 (~15% server response time improvement for block themes, committed in [55687])

The Plugin Checker engineering has been completed for milestone 2 which now also includes additional checks. Progress can be seen in this GitHub repo, which eventually should be transferred to the WordPress organization. 

Team headlines and updates

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. Europe 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/. was a great success – thank you to those who joined! There were 2 performance tables this year; the first focused on the script loading strategy API testing the PR by modifying some plugins and core code to use it, and the second focused on profiling and benchmarking. 

Several new articles were added to the Performance Handbook this month:

• Profiling vs Benchmarking article
• Best practices for performance measurement
• Benchmarking php performance with server timing
• PHP performance with XHProf

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.

May’s release 2.4.0 includes further enhancements to creating stand-alone plugins and infrastructure, as well as some small bug fixes. 

The Performance Lab plugin has also reached 80k active installations this month!

#core-performance, #performance