WordPress 6.4 comes with new presents!

This edition comes at you from the wonderful location of Gerolstein. A beautiful small town in the middle of the German Eifel region.

I’m here because this is the location of the very first WordCamp Germany. If you’re here as well, do come say hi!

Number 91 is a long one, hope you are ready!

Inside WordPress is sponsored by Object Cache Pro. And the PRO part here is not an exaggeration. Whenever you find yourself running a WooCommerce site with lots of orders, products, and/or activity, you’ll be amazed how much faster Object Cache Pro will make your WordPress site.

See how it will help you!

🗞️ Inside WordPress News

Here’s what I saw happening this past week:

I talked about a demo link provided by WordPress Playground in a previous edition, and while that’s temporarily removed Marcus Burnette posted a very interesting trac ticket on how to best approach the next iteration.

Thoughtful read! And a perfect example of how this should’ve been approached from the get-go. Do read Rich Tabor’s thoughts on it as well!

InstaWP has hit a big milestone with more than 500K created with InstaWP now.

This is your quarterly reminder that you can show and demo what the Block Editor looks like to anyone. Just share this link: https://wordpress.org/gutenberg/

Speaking of the editor, there will be heaps of changes going into WordPress 6.4 that you should read up on!

WordPress 6.4

WordPress 6.4 saw it’s first Release Candidate, and that means lots of Dev Notes have been published in the past week.

WordPress 6.4 brings enhancements centered around object caching. The enhancements lead to better handling of filters, they reduce database queries, and improve overall system efficiency.

What’s not to love?! As my good friend Till Krüss said: The query splitting change is HUGE.

Now we’re getting somewhere 😍. WordPress 6.4 introduces the Block Hooks API which will allow a block to automatically insert itself relative to instances of other block types.

This will allow us to insert a block into any specific position hooked to any other block. Reminds me a lot of how the Genesis Framework handles things. And I love how flexible that system of hooks and filters was.

WordPress 6.4 says goodbye to Attachment Pages.

WordPress 6.4 allows us to be smarter with autoloading options! Too many options is a common cause for slow server response time as well as bugs while using a persistent object cache. And that’s getting fixed now! 🎉

WordPress 6.4 will add image loading optimization enhancements. There are too many wonderful changes to highlight just one, but I highly encourage you to read up on it as there are new filters introduced which you’ll want to understand.

Hard-coded style tags will be replaced. This will replace manually created style tags printed at the wp_head action with calls to wp_add_inline_style(). This change was implemented to address issues related to redundant code and bypassing the core’s style enqueuing system.

In other words, yet another smarter and more performant solution made it to WordPress Core 😍

Are you as excited as I am for 6.4, {{ subscriber.first_name | strip | default: “my friend” }}?!

🚀 Performance

Lighthouse v11.2 includes an overhaul to the performance category and adds an upgraded score gauge. On hover, you can see how each performance metric affects the overall performance score.
Great MySQL optimization tips for those of us who want to get the maximum out of our databases.

My favorite performance optimizing tools in WordPress:

🔆 Inside WordPress Highlight

WordPress agency Filter released their Marketers Guide to Website Performance. It’s a very complete eBook outlining exactly what the title says.

And you know, yours truly may have been asked to provide some information for this as well 😏.

Some of my favorite WordPress tools:

The most versatile and accessible form solution for WordPress
LocalWP, the easiest to use local dev solution

💡 Interesting Finds

“Take a deep breath and work on this problem step by step”

You’ll want to add this to your AI prompts going forward.

🎁 Bonus

How do you like this one as an insight in what the impact for a number of performance tweaks is?

That’s it for this week’s edition of Inside WordPress. Thanks for reading!