Call for Testing: Performant Translations
The core performance team recently conducted an in-depth i18n performance analysis. It showed that localized WordPress sites load significantly slower than a site without translations. The blog post presented and compared multiple solutions to this problem, and now the team would like to test the most promising approach at a wider scale using a dedicated plugin.
class=”wp-block-heading”>Introducing the Performant Translations plugin
What it does
The Performant Translations plugin uses a new approach to handle translation files in WordPress, making localization blazing fast. The primary purpose of this plugin is to allow broader testing of these enhancements, for which the goal is to eventually land in WordPress core.
This plugin helps to make localized WordPress sites faster by replacing the traditional MO translation files with PHP files, which are much faster to parse. Plus, PHP files can be stored in the so-called OPcache, which provides an additional speed boost.
If your site is using a language other than English (US), you should see immediate speed improvements simply by activating this plugin. No further action is required.
The Performant Translations plugin is available for download on WordPress.org or directly from your WordPress admin.
What to test and expect
Since the Performant Translations plugin requires no configuration, all that’s needed to benefit from its speed improvements is to activate the plugin.
To verify that something has changed, you could use a tool like Query Monitor or an external tool for testing server response times. In Query Monitor, the page load time and memory usage should drop quite a bit after plugin activation:
In Query Monitor you will also see how translations are loaded from PHP files from now on:
While the plugin is mostly considered to be a beta testing plugin, it has been tested and established to a degree where it should be okay to use in production. Still, as with every plugin, you are doing so at your own risk.
It’s also worth noting that the plugin has been successfully tested with common multilingual plugins, such as WPML, Weglot, TranslatePress, MultilingualPress, and Polylang. It also works fine with Loco Translate and the Preferred Languages feature plugin.
Should you choose to stop testing the Performant Translation plugins, uninstalling it will remove all of its traces.
Provide your feedback
If you encounter any issues or simply have questions about the plugin, please leave a comment below or open a new support topic. In addition to that, contributions can be made on GitHub.
The performance team’s goal is to get as much feedback as possible and further refine the approach so that it can ultimately be proposed to be merged into WordPress core 6.5. That means testing will last for a few months at least.
