Pressing for Performance

The wonderful world of WordPress has been around a nearly two decades. In that time, we have seen so much change on the web. Web performance was once about raw timing, but today user experience and several metrics share the stage. We now have core web vitals and Lighthouse scores to contend with.

For example:

only 19% of WordPress sites have good core web vitals, ranking it 3rd last among the top 10 CMSs.
28% of WordPress sites have good largest contentful paint – tied for last in the top 10 CMSs.
WordPress sites also have a median Lighthouse score of 26, ranking below the median average across the web, but also load 24 resources under the /plugins/ path.

Could these figures be related? Pressing for Performance is a talk about using these data points to help make well-researched decisions along with best practices to improve WordPress’s web performance and provide the best user experience possible.

What You’ll Learn

• A little WordPress history
• Why performance literacy matters
• Web performance today
• Lighthouse score metrics
• Core web vitals metrics
• How WordPress performance could use some work