Recently, the official WordPress Performance team released two major plugins that will significantly boost the responsiveness of webpages.
The Performance team releases plugins that are enabled with the latest technologies and pre-render the URL before the user clicks on the links while speeding up the lazy loading of images.
WordPress Core Performance Team
WordPress’s core performance team coordinates and collaborates with other WordPress core development teams to enhance performance by overseeing the development and ensuring that the teams work on projects that directly boost the core performance.
According to the initial plan of the core performance team, the key tasks included:
- Outline the scope
- Create a mission statement for the team
- Lead the teams and the working group formation
- Plan and formulate a road map
- Coordinate and Communicate on the areas to be tackled
- Collaborate on administrative tasks like conducting weekly meetings, using the Slack channel, scheduling the nominations of working group representations, etc.
WordPress Performance Plugins
As per the WordPress ideology, any performance enhancements are created as plugins and tested thoroughly before deploying them into future versions of WordPress.
The aim is to help users who download these plugins first get an opportunity to speed up their website performance and enjoy a hassle-free experience. Besides, they get the privilege to share their experiences, whether positive or negative, with the community. This is incredibly helpful for a DeKalb County DWI attorney who may need to work on their site with these new experiences.
One of the initial yet popular plugins of WordPress is the Performance Lab Plugin, which offers five modules for users, and these can be turned on or off based on the requirement.
At present, the five modules in the Performance Lab Plugin include:
Core Color Changes
Includes support to store the core/dominant color of the uploaded images and create a placeholder background of the color.
WebP Support Health Check
This feature includes a WebP support check in the website’s health check status.
WebP uploads
This feature creates WebP uploads for new versions of JPEG image upload, in case the server supports it.
Enqueued Assets Health Check
This feature adds a CSS and JS resource to the website’s health check status.
Autoloaded Options Health Check
This feature adds a health check for autoloaded options in the site’s health check status.
New WordPress Performance Plugins
The two new plugins recently announced by WordPress are:
Auto-sizes for lazy-loaded images Plug-in
This new WordPress plug-in uses the concept of lazy-loading performance optimization. As per this technique, the necessary images, which are mandatory for the website to be visible to users, are loaded first, thereby reducing the loading speed of the website. Those other images on the website that are not important are gradually loaded as and when the user clicks or scrolls down the page.
Speculation Rules Plug-in
This plug-in focuses on leveraging the Speculation Rules API to download the resources from the website that a user will most likely request. The Speculations Rules API estimates that a web page will be requested by the user and pre-renders it before the user clicks the link.
The Speculation Rules API is designed to enhance the performance of web pages by letting the browser predict which page is likely to be requested by a user and pre-rendering the page before the user clicks the link. The browser pre-fetches the resources needed for the user to navigate to a different web page.
According to the Mozilla Developer Page, Speculation Rules API is:
“The Speculation Rules API is designed to improve performance for future navigations. It targets document URLs rather than specific resource files, and so makes sense for multi-page applications (MPAs) rather than single-page applications (SPAs).
The Speculation Rules API provides an alternative to the widely-available <link rel=” prefetch”> feature and is designed to supersede the Chrome-only deprecated <link rel=” prerender”> feature. It provides many improvements over these technologies, along with a more expressive, configurable syntax for specifying which documents should be prefetched or prerendered.”
Furthermore, this Speculation Rules API works on at least Chrome 121 browser. So, users who try fetching the web page on any other browser that doesn’t support this API will have a normal experience with how the web page is displayed.
The WordPress Performance team aims to redefine the user experience by speeding up the website loading time through these two plug-ins.