Category: Performance

Optimize your WordPress (Session Full)

In this workshop, participants will learn more about the performance of their websites. What goes into having a fast website, and a good user experience? We will answer the question “Why should you care about site performance in the first place?”

We will learn about simple tools you can use to test and monitor your website, and how to interpret and act on the results. We will talk about setting a performance budget and how to weigh performance when updating sites. If you can, bring your laptop along, and have a plan for a specific website (or plugin or theme) you want to work on optimizing. We’ll take a couple of short working breaks to try out the tools we learn about.

Enhancing performance in an open-source CMS ecosystem

While WordPress is still the CMS with the largest market share by far, certain proprietary CMSs have been heavily catching up in the past few years. Despite a much more limited feature set, they are gaining popularity, and much of that can be attributed to better user experience and performance. Admittedly, proprietary CMSs hosted in a controlled environment and maintained by a single company have a much easier job improving performance, compared to an open-source CMS with a massive third-party ecosystem with over 60,000 plugins and themes like WordPress. But exploring ways to enhance performance in WordPress at scale is crucial for long-term success and, with over 40% market share, should even be a responsibility towards the open web.

In late 2021, the official WordPress performance team was formed, to tackle monitoring, enhancing, and promoting performance in the WordPress ecosystem. This session will take a closer look at the origin of the team, its focus areas and initial priorities, the goals achieved so far, the roadmap for the future, and how you can help.

Optimization strategies for the Paint Web Vitals (Session Full)

I have optimized performance at enterprise scale for the last 7 years, leading a team that has built a strong understanding of which optimizations are easy and which provide the greatest improvements. Now I am offering that knowledge to you. In this workshop, we will focus on the web vitals with the highest impact for the least effort, the paint metrics. Together we will improve these key metrics, get your site on screen faster, and identify common problematic patterns and fix them. This workshop’s road to quick wins will boost your confidence to dive into web optimization. How does becoming a performance advocate for your team sound? You will need a laptop with the latest version of the Chrome browser installed. Target audience: anyone with a working knowledge of HTML and an interest in front-end optimization. CSS or JS experience is not required.