Performance Chat Summary: 8 October 2024

Announcements

Welcome to our new members of #core-performance
WordPress 6.7 Beta 2 is October 8, with Beta 3 following on October 15
New Web Worker Offloading plugin is now published and available for download
Official announcement that the Plugin Check has been incorporated into the submission process for all new WordPress plugins

Table of Contents

@clarkeemily there are 12 issues currently ‘In Progress’ from our Performance GitHub board, and also 9 issues in ‘To Do’
- There are several ‘Good First Issues‘ available for anyone interested in contributing alongside @adamsilverstein
@mukesh27 For the Modern Image Formats I opened Modern Image Formats: Sub-sizes image didn’t add original image extension issue. @adamsilverstein when you have moment could you please verify the expected behaviour.
@westonruter There are a few open PRs for Optimization Detective which I’m continuing to iterate on. I plan for these to be ready for review starting today.
@joemcgill Just wanted to share some encouraging initial CrUX results from the auto-sizes work that @flixos90 was able to gather on https://github.com/WordPress/performance/issues/1186 based on folks who are using the Enhanced Responsive Images plugin.
- “Worth highlighting: At the 70th percentile, we see a reduction of over 40% on desktop and almost 60% on mobile in terms of wasted pixels and wasted bytes. I also ran a modified version of the query only to get the LCP difference for the similar intersection of sites, and that looks great too, with +8.2% on desktop and +6.2% on mobile (the overall LCP diff in that time for all WordPress sites was only ~+1%, per https://cwvtech.report).”
@joemcgill This is encouraging, and will be worth keeping an eye on once 6.7 is released, given that we’ve added auto-sizes via #61847

@mukesh27 Regarding the improvements to the calculation, the Core ticket #62046, I’ve opened PR #7522, which includes unit tests. The tests have passed, so could @joemcgill please take a look when you have a moment?
- @joemcgill planning to take a deeper look into #62046 later this week

@flixos90 This already predated last week’s meeting, but I don’t think I shared it here: In https://github.com/WordPress/performance/issues/1032#issuecomment-2384151984 I summarized some of the responses for the onboarding feedback form so far.
- I think the biggest priority based on the onboarding feedback is to make the feature/plugin activation work via AJAX. Because right now it results in a fresh page load, it means quickly activating multiple features is unnecessarily slow. It can sometimes even lead to weird errors if users click multiple buttons too fast (before the page reloaded)
- @flixos90 to open an issue for this

@mukesh27 The WP 6.7 Beta 2 Performance Benchmark Report shows the regression in block (TT4) theme, For full details check https://github.com/WordPress/performance/issues/1572#issuecomment-2398943461
- The PR https://github.com/WordPress/wordpress-develop/pull/7486 has been reviewed. It explores one approach to address the background image regression, which accounts for a ~4% regression in block themes.