Performance Chat Summary: 25 August 2026

The full chat log is available beginning here on Slack.

Table of Contents

WordPress Performance Trac tickets

@mukesh27 shared a performance regression found in WordPress 7.1 and reported as #65929 and asked anyone with time to take a look and said any review or feedback would be greatly appreciated.
@westonruter shared that WCUS Contributor Day was formatted like a hackathon this year. His team worked on eliminating script and style concatenation in favor of prefetching scripts and styles likely to be used on the next screen. For example, the login screen prefetches the scripts and styles used on the dashboard, while the dashboard or edit posts list screen prefetches styles used in the post editor. They saw promising performance improvements, including a greater than 70% reduction in LCP when accessing the dashboard from the login screen. The PR #13084 is in progress and ready for early review and testing. He added that the biggest benefit is eliminating script and style concatenation, which is the source of many bugs. In his view, the performance benefit is a bonus.

@mukesh27 asked @westonruter whether there was a plan for releasing PR #2639.
- @westonruter re-shared that the PR for the next round of Performance Lab plugin updates is ready for review and testing: PR #2639. ZIPs are available at (comment). He noted that the release includes strict_types, so it warrants extra testing, and also includes several housekeeping changes intended to improve the release process. The PR already has approvals, but he was not sure whether smoke testing had been completed for each build. If that could be done that day, he said he would feel comfortable going ahead with the release

@westonruter shared that he is coming off a very busy summer of travel and Core security work. He is finally back home and can start catching up. His security work will continue, but hopefully at a more managed pace. He noted that there are many PR reviews needed.
@mukesh27 added that there are also Core commits. @westonruter responded that commits are now cheap, while reviews are hard.