WordPress Podcast (English)

Two years after the formation of the Performance team, WordPress has managed to include several performance improvements in the latest versions.

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Program transcript

Hello, I’m Javier Casares, and you’re listening to WordPress Podcast, bringing the weekly news from the WordPress Community.

In this program, you’ll find the information from April 15 to 21, 2024.

About three years ago, a subgroup of the Core team known as Core-Performance was created, which has since become a standalone team within WordPress.

Initially, it seemed that the Performance team might not achieve much, but thanks to the addition of several people, and even the involvement of Google as a sponsor for some of them on the team, the situation has improved significantly. Thanks to experiments from the Performance Lab plugin now split into different plugins to test each functionality separately, we have some very interesting updates regarding WordPress performance.

For example, WordPress 6.3 included various changes that affect how WordPress loads images, and later added compatibility with formats like WebP or AVIF. This has improved loading times by 21% in some cases.

Another example is WordPress 6.5, which incorporated, as a first step towards other functionalities, improvements in the loading of translation files. Considering that more than half of the WordPress installations worldwide are in a language other than the default, this has had a significant effect, making WordPress load 23% faster in that regard.

However, we must not always talk about front-end elements. Performance improvements also need to affect the user experience… in this case, the editors, since WordPress 6.5 has incorporated improvements in the editor that have reduced access times to writing by 80% and doubled the speed of element loading.

Perhaps another interesting element is for plugin creators who, thanks to the Plugin Check plugin, can review some elements that affect the performance of the plugin, which can enhance the overall WordPress load and the experience of those using the plugin.

And generally speaking… while the internet has become 5% faster this year… if you use WordPress, it has improved by 8%.

The Core team has proposed the completion of the third phase of the Rollback Auto-Update project, which suggests that if something goes wrong during an automatic update, it can be reverted without the user having to do anything.

In WordPress 6.2, the move_dir() function was introduced, which is faster than copying. In WordPress 6.3, this functionality was introduced for manual updates so that, with the person present, if something fails, the system reverts. With this new proposal, in the automatic update system, if something fails, the system will also revert, with notifications to the users.

The Meta team has presented an update of the Pattern Directory which is now completely made with blocks, although this will not be the first iteration, as there will be adjustments in the future when all sections of WordPress.org are redesigned.

An interesting new feature is that the directory has begun to use the Interactivity API for some functionalities, such as marking as favorite. The load time has been reduced to 1 second, from previously 3 seconds.

The Openverse team has introduced Collections for tags, creators, and sources.

When accessing content, we can visit for the creator and for the source other related contents that we are viewing, belonging to the same collection.

For a tag, the functionality is similar, allowing viewing a collection of images that may have been taken at the same time or place, creating a single collection.

And finally, this podcast is distributed under a Creative Commons license as a derivative version of the WordPress Podcast in Spanish; you can find all the links for more information at WordPress Podcast .org.

You can follow the content in Catalan, German, Spanish, and French.

Thanks for listening, and until the next episode!