Performance Chat Summary: 14 July 2026
The full chat log is available beginning here on Slack.
WordPress Performance Trac tickets
- @westonruter shared a late submission for inclusion in WordPress 7.1 and requested reviews for PR #12514, which provides a mechanism for hosting providers to change the default Speculative Loading eagerness and mode without requiring an mu-plugin.
- @swissspidy shared that Core was a bit hesitant in the past to introduce new constants, let alone environment variables, and asked whether this is something hosts could control with an mu-plugin instead.
- @westonruter replied that there is such an environment variable and constant for
wp_get_environment_type(). - @westonruter shared that configuration of Realtime Collaboration was also being done via environment variables.
- @westonruter shared that the reason for the environment variable is explained in the Realtime Collaboration discussion, where a host may not be able to control all the PHP being used in a hosted site and hosts could potentially control the PHP being used but may not “manage” their hosted WordPress sites, so doing so would be a violation of sorts of what their customers expect.
Performance Lab Plugin (and other performance plugins)
- @westonruter shared that there are some new PRs that need reviewing, but has not had time to review them yet due to work on Core tickets and expressed hope that there would be more time available for reviews within the next week.
Our next chat will be held on Tuesday, July 28, 2026 at 16:00 UTC in the #core-performance channel in Slack.


