WordPress powers over 40% of websites. When its core gets faster, the larger internet benefits. That’s the ambition behind the WordPress Performance Team: a cross-company initiative focused on improving speed, efficiency, and thus user experience across all WordPress sites.
At Fueled, our 10up WordPress Practice has been part of this effort from the start, helping institute improvements that are now baked into WordPress core. From how scripts and images are handled to how WordPress loads configuration data, our work has made the platform faster out of the box, and made millions of websites deliver better digital experiences.
A Measurably Faster WordPress for Everyone
Improving WordPress performance at the platform level creates tangible benefits for inclusivity, user experience, and even business outcomes. When a site feels snappy and responsive, users are more likely to stay, interact, and convert (whether that means completing a purchase or filling out a form). Importantly and conversely, a slow website can be a barrier – much like an inaccessible building entrance – so performance has an inclusivity and accessibility angle. By baking optimizations into WordPress core, we help ensure that people on slower networks or older devices aren’t left behind.
Google’s Core Web Vitals (CWV) provides key metrics for page loading, interactivity, and visual stability, and has become a standard yardstick for web user experience. The Performance Team targets core changes that measurably improve WordPress site performance against these metrics. And it’s working: the share of WordPress sites with “good” CWV scores has climbed significantly over the few years, enough to even budge the web’s overall performance stats.
A Deep Dive into our Performance Work
I’ve published an engineering-heavy deep dive digging into some highlights from my work on the WordPress Performance team over on LinkedIn. Among other topics, the article goes deep into:
- Smarter script loading: async and defer in WordPress.
- Improving image optimization with the new sizes=”auto” spec.
- Optimizing options data queries with smarter autoload defaults.
Committed to Performance Excellence and the Open Web
Our work on the WordPress Performance Team, buoyed by support from some of our ecosystem clients and partners, reflects our expertise and commitment to performance excellence and shaping modern web standards. Initiatives like these also help us stay at the cutting edge of web performance engineering, which channels into our client work and tooling like Monitor.
If you want help improving the performance of your web platform, product, or website, get in touch.
