September 3, 2025 — The Core Performance team has been incubating enhancements for WordPress through the Performance Lab plugin. These have been available for a few years now; some have been merged into core (e.g. Speculative Loading) while others are more experimental and remain in testing (e.g. Optimization Detective). This talk will look at how these performance plugins impact the speed of a stock WordPress site running the Twenty Twenty-Five default theme, using Core Web Vitals benchmarks and Lighthouse scores. It will also look at how the theme’s performance can be further tuned, including the use of core patches proposed for the next major release (also available in plugin form to leverage today) to further accelerate the loading of pages to improve the user experience of site visitors. Presented byWeston Ruter

December 10, 2017 — This year’s heavy focus in core has been on WordPress’s next generation Gutenberg editor. With the call to learn JavaScript deeply, it’s no surprise that Gutenberg is written in a JavaScript-first architecture. Once Gutenberg and its building blocks are in core, focus will broaden to then include Customizer. The Customizer was the first JavaScript single-page application in WordPress (added in 3.4). With the focus transition from Editor to Customizer, while keeping a JavaScript-first mindset, it is important for contributors and plugin authors that the Customizer’s JavaScript API be demystified to facilitate the integration of the new block editing interfaces. In my talk I’ll delve into the inner workings of the Customizer JS API, show how to use React to build custom controls in the Customizer, and demonstrate how to use the Customizer to preview changes to sites that use React-based themes—including previewing changes on headless REST API-driven sites.

December 4, 2017 — The State of the Word is the annual keynote address at WordCamp US, presented by the co-founder of WordPress, Matt Mullenweg. In this year’s address, Matt summarizes the highlights of 2017 — including the 4.8 and 4.9 releases — and previews what we can look forward to in 2018 ( spoiler: it’s Gutenberg 🙂 ).

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November 22, 2015 — The Customizer is WordPress’s framework for live previewing changes to a site. Live preview gives confidence to those who would otherwise lack it when making a change: it gives freedom to experiment and explore, without a negative “save and surprise” experience which discourages users from trying to make future changes. This talk will explore how the Customizer can improve the site management experience for users by looking at unique applications of the Customizer that are currently possible and also by looking at what is planned for the Customizer in the future of WordPress core.

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