With the new WordPress performance team that was formed in late 2021, WordPress now has a dedicated working group focused on tackling performance in the CMS. While performance enhancements are obviously nothing new and have been landing in WordPress core throughout the years, in order to truly make an impact at the massive scale of the WordPress ecosystem, it cannot stop there. WordPress core actually performs quite well out of the box, but with more than 60,000 plugins and themes available and endless combinations between them activated on individual sites, the situation looks a lot worse. We cannot realistically expect every plugin and theme developer to be familiar with all the latest performance best practices.
So despite that, how can we as a project improve performance at scale? While introducing solid WordPress core APIs and documenting and promoting them for third-party developers remains essential, it takes automation mechanisms centralized in WordPress core to orchestrate all active plugins and themes in a way that they operate well together – the block editor plays a central role for this as well. In addition to that, administrators need to have the tools to make educated decisions on plugins and themes to choose and monitor their performance. This session will take a closer look at the different pillars of enhancing performance at scale.