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, and a monthly Repo Scrub, also on Wednesday; check https://make.wordpress.org/meetings/ for current time.

Team headlines and updates

With WordPress 6.7 BetaBeta A pre-release of software that is given out to a large group of users to trial under real conditions. Beta versions have gone through alpha testing in-house and are generally fairly close in look, feel and function to the final product; however, design changes often occur as part of the process. release coming up on October 1, there are 20 track tickets lined up. The WordPress Performance Team has been focusing on a few different enhancements in August, such as adding auto to the size attribute for any image that should be lazy loaded (details here), adding fetchPriority property to ES Modules and Import Maps (details here), along with a couple of AVIF fixes.  

In WordPress 6.7, we will continue working on internal improvements to ensure that the Interactivity 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.’s code is as simple and stable as possible and to make it resilient when used asynchronously. This will pave the way for performance improvements such as directive code splitting or lazy loading of interactive blocks. 

Improving the calculation of image size attributes

The biggest initiative for August was including auto-sizes in Core which is now ready for the Beta release, thanks to @joemcgill and @mukesh27. Now, the team will focus on the remaining followup issues outlined in this Roadmap, starting with accounting ancestor blocks into image size calculations. 

Enable client side modern image generation 

Allowing client-side media processing offers a solution by leveraging the browser’s capabilities to handle tasks like image resizing and compression. This approach not only alleviates the strain on server resources but also enables the use of more advanced image formats and compression techniques, ultimately improving website performance and user experience. We will have a PR ready soon, but for more information, you can review the overview issue. 

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 (and other performance plugins)

Performance Lab plugin updates are released monthly on the third Monday of the month, with the exception of this month. The release has been pushed to September 23, due to our participation in WCUS. 

The August Performance Lab plugin release included: 

Version 3.4.0, on August 19 

• Performance Lab
  • #1456 Remove Server-Timing metric for the autoloaded options query time 
  • #1374 Fix disabled options from reappearing in Site Health after external update 
  • #1474 Improve Performance screen when external requests to WordPress.orgWordPress.org The community site where WordPress code is created and shared by the users. This is where you can download the source code for WordPress core, plugins and themes as well as the central location for community conversations and organization. https://wordpress.org/ fail 
• Enhanced Responsive Images
  • #1446 Injection of sizes=auto into images can be more robust with HTMLHTML HTML is an acronym for Hyper Text Markup Language. It is a markup language that is used in the development of web pages and websites. TagTag Tag is one of the pre-defined taxonomies in WordPress. Users can add tags to their WordPress posts along with categories. However, while a category may cover a broad range of topics, tags are smaller in scope and focused to specific topics. Think of them as keywords used for topics discussed in a particular post. Processor
  • #1399  Remove sizes attribute when the responsive image disabled 
  • #1445 Harden logic to add auto keyword to sizes attribute to prevent duplicate keyword
• Modern Image Formats
  • #1470 Improve disabling checkbox for Picture Element on Media settings screen
  • #1437 Add missing full size image in PICTURE > SOURCE srcset 
  • #1408 Picture element: Correct the fallback image
  • #1450 Don’t wrap PICTURE element if JPEG fallback is not available 
  • #1354 Fix setting sizes attribute on PICTURE > SOURCE elements 

After the PL release, the team has been focused on Embed Optimizer and reserving space for embeds to reduce (even entirely eliminate) layout shifts (#1373). As exciting is also new work for Image Prioritizer which adds fetchpriority=low to images which are in the initial viewport but which are not visible, such as when they are in subsequent carousel slides (#1482). Props to @westonruter. 

More new work is done on Modern Images plugin to include converting upload PNGs in addition to JPEGs (#1421), as well as progress on Web Worker Offloading plugin (#1468 and #1455). 

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. US is also around the corner, from September 17-20, in Portland, Oregon. The Performance team will be there, and we would love to see folks join us. Our table will be led by @adamsilverstein, and @swissspidy will give a talk on client-side media processing. 

Our WordPress #core-performance SlackSlack Slack is a Collaborative Group Chat Platform https://slack.com/. The WordPress community has its own Slack Channel at https://make.wordpress.org/chat/. channel has reached over 1k members. Thank you to all of the lurkers and contributors!  

#core-performance, #performance