April 10, 2024 — INP (Interaction to Next Paint) is a new Core Web Vital that measures interactivity by seeing how long it takes for a page to give visual feedback in response to user input. By capturing the worst of these interactions, the INP metrics helps developers understand and debug resources that are contributing to a poor user experience.

The INP metric is already built into a wide variety of testing tools including Web Page Test and Lighthouse. As a WordPress site, plugin or theme developer, it is important to understand what INP is and how you can leverage it to improve the user experience your site or product delivers.

In this talk, we will discuss:

– What INP measures exactly and what poor experiences it helps capture
– How to measure your site’s INP – RUM & lab data
– How to improve your site’s INP – top culprits
– INP best practices for WordPress developers

By the end of this talk, you will have a good understanding of INP and how you can improve your user’s experience by improving your INP!

November 18, 2023 — This 14 minute talk is all about images on the web: current formats, how browsers load images, and upcoming formats. Learn when and how to use different image formats.

October 1, 2023 — Overview
This workshop will cover the basics of understanding blocking resources, how browser threads work, and how to minimize blocking resources. We will review some examples and analyze submitted sites. Participants will learn to identify and resolve blocking issues on their own sites.

Summary
This workshop will cover the basics of blocking resources, how they affect Core Web Vitals, and how to identify and fix blocking issues on your website.

The workshop will be divided into three sections:

An introductory presentation covering the basics of blocking resources, how browser threads work, and why (and what) resources can be blocking for the browser.

A live analysis review of submitted sites. Workshop participants will submit their website URLs ahead of time and a handful will be selected for analysis. We will go through performance reports and dev tools traces to understand and investigate how to resolve blocking related issues.

A final section where participants will try the techniques they learned in the workshop on their own sites.

The workshop will conclude with a summary of the concepts learned and some interactive polls to see what participants got out of the workshop.

September 29, 2023 — Join us for a comprehensive and engaging panel discussion at this year’s WordCamp as we delve into the world of performance optimization in WordPress. Our panelists, representing a diverse range of experience and expertise from site owners to plugin developers to core contributors, will share their insights and thoughts about website speed and overall performance and user experience.

During the panel, we will discuss the common challenges faced when it comes to performance optimization, and how to overcome them. Our panelists will also discuss why performance is critical for a good user experience, and how it can impact the success of a website.

Panelists will discuss the tools and best practices they follow when optimizing performance. We will also discuss how to handle performance challenges specific to different areas, how to balance features vs. their performance impact, and ideas for how we might leverage Gutenberg and Site Editing to improve WordPress performance in the future.

Join us and learn what it takes to take your website or product performance to the next level!

January 17, 2023 — All about images on the web: current formats, how browsers load images, and upcoming formats – when and how to use them.

This talk will start with a review of image formats commonly used on the web today – jpeg, git, png, svg and webp. What are they each good for? When and how should sites use them?
Next, we will dig into the surprisingly complicated loading process of pages and images in the browser and the implications for site optimization.
Finally, we will dive into newer formats like AVIF, JPEG XL and WebP2, learn what promise they hold and how site owners can start using them today.

Presentation Slides »

December 3, 2022 — Learn all about images on the web! Topics include current formats, how browsers load images, and upcoming formats.

Start with a review of image formats commonly used on the web today: JPEG, GIT, PNG, SVG, and WebP. Find out what each format is good for, as well as when and how to use them.

Then dig into the surprisingly complicated loading process of pages and images in the browser and the implications for site optimization.

Finally, dive into newer formats like AVIF, JPEG XL, and WebP2, and how to begin using those in your projects.

July 17, 2022 — 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.

October 1, 2020 — Web Vitals is an initiative by Google to provide a great user experience on the web with measurable quality signals. This talk explores how WordPress developers and website owners can check, monitor and improve Web Vitals metrics.

Presentation Slides »

July 9, 2018 — We will explore the existing major JavaScript API’s including wp.api – the bundled REST API client, wp.customize the improved JavaScript Customizer API, wp.codeEditor – the new code editor built into WordPress; wp.heartbeat – a powerful and easy client/server synchronization API; and wp.media – to leverage the media modal. We’ll also explore the future of WordPress JavaScript and look at the JavaScript APIs coming to WordPress including the APIs exposed by Gutenberg, and the WordPress npm packages including wp.hooks – JavaScript actions and filters matching the PHP versions.

February 9, 2018 — Take a tour down memory lane as we explore the JavaScript files and features added to each version of WordPress: from quicktags.js in version 1.0 to wp-api.js in 4.7. We’ll look at the JavaScript based features in today’s WordPress including media, the customizer, themes, plugins, revisions and the REST API client. We will learn when and why Backbone was introduced as a JavaScript framework for Core and why and how it is used extensively in core. Finally, we will learn about the exciting things happening now in the wider JavaScript community and in WordPress core that will shape the WordPress of tomorrow.