WordPress Developer Tools & Performance Analysis #074

We saw one of the shortest lived WordPress versions last week, didn’t we? Kudos to the core team for releasing 6.2.2 as fast as they did! Made for an exciting week 😅.

But we’ve had a relatively quiet week until this Friday, which brings us to another Inside WordPress newsletter!

Thank you to all who’ve joined in the last period. It’s great to see the newsletter growing steadily!

🗞️ Inside WordPress News

Here’s what stood out this past week:

Jonathan Bossenger published a State of WordPress developer tools survey . He’s trying to find out what tools WordPress developers use.

If you identify as one, do fill it out !

Kyle Van Deusen made it to last week’s newsletter, but he’s gone and done it again! He shared a twitter thread full of Free website testing tools. All of those were written up in a blog post as well . As one does.

The 6th episode of my Within WordPress Podcast was published today as well. This edition is with a good friend of mine; Noel Tock . Noel and I dive deep into WordPress’ history, and from that perspective, look at the future of WordPress on the litteral eve of WordPress’ 20th birthday.

🚀 Performance

The WordPress Core Performance team published their WordPress 6.2 Server Performance Analysis Summary .

It’s a quite extensive write-up, and shows us all where the focus is going to be for the next couple of releases. There are three things that stand out for me, that excite me: improve translation loading, improve resolving block templates, and improve rendering of block widgets. All three are going to have a very significant impact on WordPress’ performance.

Google updated their article about the introduction of INP to Web Core Vitals. I published a summary of what that means .

Wikepedia wrote up how they were able to make their pages 300ms faster .

Now, this is one of those interesting reads. If you’ve ever been tweaking your Core Vitals based on your Google Lighthouse reports, this is a write-up you’ll appreciate. Lots to learn about ”Blocking time”.

As you peruse items in an online shop and navigate back and forth between product pages, bfcache ensures instant reloading of previously viewed pages, eliminating any wait time for server response. And here’s everything you wanted to know about it .

I didn’t know we had a name for it, but this is called Back Forward cache.

My favorite performance optimizing tools in WordPress:

🔆 Inside WordPress Highlight

One of my favorite WordPress solutions you didn’t think you needed is InstaWP . They kindly sponsored last week’s Inside WordPress, and as such, I did some extra research this week on what they’ve got planned and such. Vikas shared a neat new feature they’re going to include shortly. This feature eliminates the stress of template matching by guaranteeing that purchased templates are identical to the demo. No more import issues – you get exactly what you buy. Selling via InstaWP . Interesting move, for sure. What do you think?

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

Stumbled across a huge repository of 8400+ handcrafted SVG icons. Maybe your next favorite library? It’s called Lineicons .

📖 What I am reading watching

Not a read this week, but a watch. It’s a TED talk by Sal Khan called How AI could save (not destroy) education. There’s a lot of gloom and doom about the world of AI and how it is overtaking ”every single ascpect” of our lives, but this talk gives a lot of great context .

🎁 Bonus

As mentioned in last week’s Inside WordPress, Human Made organized an online conference called Word on the Future: AI for WordPress . There were lots of cool sessions throughout the event, and you can watch them all as they’ve all been recorded.

The panel on AI and the Future of WordPress was moderated by yours truly and had some interesting discussions!

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