The Site Speed Frontier with Performance Lab and Beyond

The Core Performance team has been incubating enhancements for WordPress through the Performance Lab plugin. These have been available for a few years now; some have been merged into core (e.g. Speculative Loading) while others are more experimental and remain in testing (e.g. Optimization Detective). This talk will look at how these performance plugins impact the speed of a stock WordPress site running the Twenty Twenty-Five default theme, using Core Web Vitals benchmarks and Lighthouse scores. It will also look at how the theme’s performance can be further tuned, including the use of core patches proposed for the next major release (also available in plugin form to leverage today) to further accelerate the loading of pages to improve the user experience of site visitors.