Adam:

Is this working? Yes! cool…awesome thanks so much for coming everyone I’m really excited to host this panel and we’re talking about performance today.

I’m really grateful to my panelists for agreeing to join um…this is a brief intro when when I propose this panel.

Performance for me is about way more than the raw speed of a website it’s about how users experience your website and how it performs for you as a website owner or a website builder so we’re going to sort of broaden the topic of performance to include anything that can affect the experience that people have on your website…so just to get started I’d like to go around and ask each of my panelists to just introduce themselves say kind of where they come from why they might be here on the stage to talk about performance

I want to go start for me if Miriam okay.

Miriam:

Hi I’m Miriam Schwab um…I’m the co-founder formerly the CEO of a company called Strattic.

Strattic is a different approach to publishing and hosting WordPress websites and we do that in a static architecture and by doing that we remove the underlying server stack and in that way sites can be much more performant and scalable etc and secure.

Strattic was acquired by Elementor exactly a year ago. I’m now celebrating my one year anniversary there and uh yeah for now Strattic is part of Elementor and I’m happy to be here on this panel.

Thierry Muller:

Hi everyone. I’m Thierry Muller based in Switzerland. I’m a software engineering manager at Google, and um…specifically in Google Chrome and web platform and me and my team we care a lot about raising user experience on the web specifically for WordPress sites trying to make a better web.

Rahul:

Hi I’m Rahul I’m founder and CEO of rtCamp from India so as part of my work I work with clients who are worried about performance and all the metrics that’s around it.

Adam:

Excellent, and just in full transparency, I have a bunch of questions.

I’m going to ask here and I have already shared those with the panelists um so we’re just going to start out with something hopefully pretty easy so what I’m going to ask is if you would tell me about some work you’ve been doing recently to help push performance forward in your product or service or work area and I guess I’ll start with you again Miriam and then I’ll vary who gets to start okay.

Miriam:

So as I’m sure you know the world of performance is never ending in terms of how we approach it and different ways to try to optimize your sites for performance um…that can start with the back end and it also it obviously can apply to the front end so in terms of Strattic we’ve been we’re constantly uh taking strides to optimize the front end in different ways because in Strattic the backend no longer it ceases to be a function or an aspect of performance just because it’s not there with a fully static site that’s served up through CDN and you know available in hundreds of locations around the world you kind of have checked that box but then there’s that last mile of performance um so there’s there’s aspects to that uh that you know it’s a con it’s actually a constant challenge um because in the end if someone builds a site in a certain way and not always a good way then that HTML code the JavaScript CSS is going to be problematic and so how can we help that last mile be better even in a world where people can do whatever they want with their websites including not great things.

I’ll just also represent the Elementor aspects so Elementor’s obviously the page builder plug-in and also the hosting and also their performance has become with on both of those products the very very important focus um and part of this strategy in terms of making the users like like what you said it performance is so much more than just fast it’s about a user experience um and so we’ve seen really great improvements around that um on the hosting and the plugin as well.

Rahul:

So as part of um helping with performance to our clients uh so first thing like uh whenever new things come like there was PHP Lighthouse now there’s a lot of buzz around core web vitals uh we put a lot of efforts on educating them about the right metrics for example with web vitals there is a lab score and there is a CrUX report so many client thinks that if it’s working fast on my site that’s it like oh sorry it’s working fast on my computer then my site should do well for everyone and that’s where we try to educate them like you need to use lab data as a reference but also work on the real world data and fix performance issue for everyone not just for yourself.

Thierry Muller:

If my my part and I guess I can speak a bit on behalf of the team but we we really are on a mission to try to make every WordPress site faster and that you know we we do we have multiple projects going on um you know one area is trying to see how we can improve WordPress core uh make core faster or bring new APIs to make more core more capable from a performance perspective and then also provide better tooling for for all of you developers for sites or plugins and stuff like this to really try to embed performance as part of like the development workflow and I have better tuning like you know for example better ways of checking plugins in terms of a performance and last but not least is working with the ecosystem so you know with Elementor with other plugin developers trying to really see if we can work together on on whether it’s adopting some of this tooling or actually making the product faster so that’s kind of like what we’ve been doing busy with lately.

Adam:

Excellent thank you um okay so my next question is about artificial intelligence the hot topic of the day uh artificial intelligence has been making amazing leaps and strides recently so what uh what role do you think artificial intelligence AI could play in performance in improving performance for WordPress and I’ll go to Rahul to start.

Rahul:

So uh like it’s tough one so maybe AI can generate images that are already optimized to begin with so like all the image optimizations we do like the post processing lossless compressions and all like if we tell AI that hey I’m going to upload this on a website or I’m generating this one for the website then I think it should take care all those optimizations that are required for the web it’s a good idea anyone else okay.

Miriam:

Um…so well what would a panel be if we didn’t talk about AI right like it’s required um I’m excited about AI because I mentioned that last mile of performance and it’s just it’s really hard for humans to get that right it just there’s you know a lot of a lot of products and initiatives trying to hack away at that and improve that but in the end you’ve got render blocking JS you’ve got render blocking CSS and trying to shift that around without breaking things is like a nearly impossible feat and I hope that at some point AI will be able to take the output of a site and just like it optimizes at this point let’s say the content that we write you know you can have it write a blog post and then tweets I don’t know if you do this but I’m just saying you can tweets etc then at some point the output of a site will be optimized by AI in a way that also makes sure that the front-end continues to function so I can see that happening at some point and actually on Strattic that would be ideal because we output the static and then it could kind of like have AI go better and then you’ve got like the best site so that’s kind of my vision of how AI will help with performance we’ll take it just like it takes a lot of things out of our hands that let’s say we’re not excellent at so and we’re trying to do it anyways so this could be something that AI can help people with as well.

Thierry Muller:

Well AI is an interesting space um and I think that we are kind of in the tipping point ideally you know it would be magical like AI solves all the performance problem and and many more but there’s always a risk to do that automatically and so I think that we’re far away from that still but the advantage of AI is really that you know we can train the models based on data and there are a few areas which I think are quite promising for example on uh tooling you know at the moment we have great tools to identify performance problems and stuff like this but not really helping to guide what we need to do next there’s a checklist of like hey you need to optimize your CSS do your JavaScript and stuff like this but it’s not really contextual to any website and so I feel that with AI and more data and trained models it will get better and better at identifying the problems and then giving some guidance more contextually um according to a given site so you know in the kind takes the WordPress it could be analyzing which plugins are installed or some setup and stuff like this and be much better at saying like hey here are the things that you need to do for your website and not just the checklist of of things that you know we have documented essentially so I see that there’s like a promising promising um future with AI yeah.

Adam:

Great awesome um so my next question is just about the general performance of WordPress as a whole and we’ve seen other platforms like Wix and Shopify dramatically improve their performance in the last few years while at the same time WordPress has either stagnated or maybe even decreased slightly compared to the web as a whole what do you attribute that to and and what do you think we could do to improve the situation yeah.

Thierry Muller:

Um we have I think to look at the different nature of which which CMS is and you mentioned Wix and you know Shopify and they are kind of SaaS services and they control the stack the stack and stuff like this so it’s kind of easier to make changes um they’re also newer CMS’s and so they don’t have kind of the legacy code base that WordPress and WordPress is distributed it’s uh it’s you know still a community still and hopefully forever a community open source project with a huge ecosystem um that you know it’s it’s a beast to move so I think that’s one you know like it’s just slower moving but I with that said I’m really confident that we will catch up so that’s one problem and I think the other one is also maybe the the lack of focus on performance until now um which is you know I think a good and a bad thing but we’re really seeing that shifting a little bit or a lot hopefully so there’s now that core performance team and there’s better tooling and there’s a lot more focus on performance we saw in 6.2 for the first time there was a performance release lead so I think performance now is starting to be taken in consideration a lot more in WordPress and it will take some time for the entire ecosystem to to actually do that as well but I think they will catch up so okay yeah.

Miriam:

Okay um so I I think that like those types of platforms have an unfair advantage in that they can fully control everything that’s happening within them end to end so they also control what happens within them end to end by telling their users that they are limited in what they can do right so if you’re building a site with Wix or Squarespace at some point many users will hit a wall because they’re going to want to customize it in a way or do something with it that it just doesn’t allow because it’s not open source because it is that kind of walled garden platform so so they have those limitations but they also have the advantage of being able to apply changes that they can just implement across the board and there’s sites with confidence because they know exactly what they allow and don’t allow within them right so so that’s kind of an unfair advantage um I think Thierry Muller’s right that there hasn’t been a focus on improving performance necessarily in WordPress I think a lot of the responsibility has been offloaded to the hosting companies the attitude has kind of been well you know let’s let the hosting companies try to solve solve this for us which is legitimate because in the end the hosting companies are the platforms that are running WordPress um and you know that attitude applies to security and other aspects of WordPress as well however in the end if the underlying software and there’s only so much that the hosting companies can do and there’s only so much that they should do so um you know I’ve been in touch with Thierry Muller and other people on the performance team and I see that now there is more support and focus on performance and WordPress which is really really amazing and really important for all of us by the way there’s also an environmental aspect to this you know if a site is using more resources look did I just yell it’s like the parties last night we’ll just yell at each other um so if they you know if it’s using a lot of resources on every page load then uh then that actually has an environmental impact as well and I think that um general kind of ethos of WordPress is better for humanity type of thing so that’s another reason we should be taking responsibility for it so um yeah so those platforms have an advantage but I think that there’s a lot of promising things that are happening within WordPress and it’s becoming a focus which is really good for many reasons and hopefully already we see like some amazing improvements made on the performance side and just one more thing I want to mention is backwards compatibility also pros and cons to that but like when you’re still supporting I don’t know we’re a PHP 5.3 or something like that then obviously it’s gonna have performance issues and we might want to as a community say well maybe we want to you know move away from that to a certain extent yeah.

Rahul:

So as uh they mentioned that WordPress is a big open source project and everything has to move taking uh entire community into consideration I think the webp we wanted to make it by default and that is a little in a lot of discussion in that the amount of energy we put in the discussion whether to make it default or not in that amount of effort Squarespace Wix and all those proprietary platform just end up doing it and making it like releasing those changes likewise even if you make it webp default or bring other changes we rely on hosting companies user choose and for example all these proprietary platform are built in CDN WordPress being self-hosted you download you host it and where you are hosting it whether they provide CDN or not so there are a lot of variables like right from the decision making to the hosting companies the consultant agency you hire their technical capability if you are hiring a SEO marketing agency who specialize in that and asking them to give better recommendation for performance that also goes wrong if they don’t know something how can they make good recommendation about that so there’s a lot of variables and then with like this 43 percent of the web’s market share uh anything we do we have to be mindful of not breaking because when we make mistakes uh a lot many sites break yeah.

Thierry Muller:

I’ll just add something regarding like some of these other products as well is of course now uh you know with Gutenberg and and some of the projects on improving the content creation um and removing some of the friction and making it better it’s really important I think for WordPress site owners to be able to create content in a better way and and more appealing content but once the site is published you know at the end of the day it’s about succeeding on the web whatever the site owner’s goal is whether it’s selling stuff and things like this and then user experience is really important at this point and I think some of these other CMS’s have understood that because they have taken some case studies and they understand that you know if the site is you know that much faster their own customers will actually succeed on the web and that’s a really an important argument for other competitors and it’s actually a feature from my perspective right and so this is something that I think that we should all as a community try to do more is tie user experience improvements back to return on investment and business goals if we want to succeed on the web it is not only about like adding features and stuff like this it’s also about delightful experience for the people consuming the content across the world not only in the US not only in Europe but everywhere right and I think that’s a key key thing to keep in mind and for that specifically some of the other CMS’s have you know taken this specific topic at the heart and we’ve seen do that really like promoting this like we are offering a platform that’s going to make you succeed because it’s more performance and stuff like this yeah.

Adam:

That’s a really good point yeah I think that’s a really good point you know tying the business returns to performance is also helps decision makers decide to invest in performance and also thank you Miriam for bringing up sustainability at contributor day uh yesterday we uh formed the official sustainability group in WordPress it’s pretty exciting and sustainability is definitely tied to performance but they’re not a one-to-one it’s not always exactly the same thing but I think it’s an important thing to bring up um because it motivates people it’s something that people already really value and again can help make the right decision um back to my questions so when you’re when you’re building your site or service or product there’s often a trade-off between adding features in and performance how do you think about that how do you find that balance between the two anyone who wants to go.

Thierry Muller:

Well I guess I just spoke a little bit about this like I you know I had this forever debates with many people is performance feature I feel that it is in many way and I’ll keep it really short but I think that it’s it’s about finding the right balance right you have to offer the the right capabilities for whatever your goal is for your website but without forgetting user experience you know if the site if your users are not even seeing your features because you know they’re dropping off before then it’s probably another good thing and maybe you know a good way to do that is just try to analyzing the drop-off point of your users you know like what and maybe do some A/B testing as well it’s like okay if I add this feature obviously it may affect my performance by this much is it really valuable like is it translating to anything that’s useful for the users and that’s probably the way to find the right balance and like like I said you know if uh if you have some fancy interaction and you see this is the time where all your users are dropping off is probably a feature you should remove um.

Miriam:

So having built a product for the last few years um basically when you’re when you’re building a product and planning it uh everything that you’re going to implement you need to consider multiple aspects to it not just what it does but what it might impact and what it might not do and um so performance is one is actually just one of those things meaning like when we implemented something we have to consider security we have to consider user experience we have to consider you know does this um detract from that so from my perspective performance should definitely be part of that and as a product developer if your product is is starting to be slow for your users they’re not going to care how amazing your features are seriously I mean if any of you not if any of you you all use products and if it starts to feel slow and sluggish you’re going to lose patience I was just using a platform for something recently I won’t say what it was because I don’t want to you know badmouth it and it’s not from the WordPress space I had to use it every day I think it was part probably targeted towards users in the US so maybe there it was fast but I’m in Israel and it was so slow that I probably would never use it again like and that’s that’s just an example so you I in my opinion always consider performance on every part of your product whether it’s the WordPress site or if you’re like a hosting company or have some kind of platform around it also your dashboard you need to make sure that people are getting this kind of snappy experience because none of us have patience and we all have other things we want to do rather than wait five seconds for something to happen so I think performance should always be part of the checks okay we’re implementing this what we’ll do to performance will it make it worse will it make it better we’ll say the same super valuable for your user experience and in the end user experience is what it’s all about and what will keep your product sticky.

Rahul:

So as agency when we’re building new features it’s very easy to get the performance right for us like definitely request some budget some efforts the trouble starts when the feature involves some integrating something like header bidding or a third party analytics tracking some kind of service which either puts blocking JavaScript or some way affects the performance and then there’s no way you can make it better like without getting in touch with the third party and that’s where uh a lot of friction happens like uh so the thing is that the client or the site owner wants uh better core web vital better score all those things but it gets tough to tell them that make them understand that this is the site is combination of everything that loads on the page including third parties and if anybody has a blocking JavaScript or something like that that is something we need get to get them on board to fix it and that’s where it uh it gets stuff like even if they have budget even if they have desire to make things fast um we just end up being dependent on the third parties like sometimes we just move um some of the JavaScript to worker thread so the main thread doesn’t block but it’s not always possible to do that without breaking the for the very first reason they added that JavaScript in the page yeah.

Thierry Muller:

I’ll just add something very quickly that may be useful for these audience especially those who are building sites for clients I feel sometimes there’s this kind of friction between developer or the agency and the client you know the client pushing for more features and the developer pushing for like more uh better performance and it goes back to what I was saying about analyzing the cost of features and I think that you know demonstrating to customers that a specific feature is actually um hurting their goals for example you know adding some fancy things on the product page reducing the the actual sales or check out arrays is a great great way to actually inform your clients like okay you want this fancy feature but it’s actually making you lose this amount of money so with a B testing it’s kind of a good way to do that so yeah if you have this fight with your clients maybe.

Adam:

All right we’ve got time for like one or two more questions here just so we’re going to wrap up um I’m going to ask uh let’s see optimization plugins are very popular in the WordPress space they often add features and optimize kind of after the site has been built I see them somewhat as a band-aid to performance problems that maybe you’ve already built into your site how do you think about that is is that a is that a good thing should should more features that are landing in optimization plugins be in core and or is it is it okay that we have this system of optimization plugins what’s your take on that anyone yeah.

Thierry Muller:

We’ll go um I think that they are definitely critical and will remain to be critical there’s a lot more that we can do in core um but you know I we there’s a huge difference between optimization on opt-in and optimization by default and this is only so much we can do in WordPress core we can be maybe a bit more opinionated but not to the extent that plugin can be and it also comes to integrating with external APIs being WordPress being distributed there is no central really service that we can connect to and yeah and so this really is plug-in territory and for for a good reason so you know I I definitely think that there’s a lot more that we can do in core but I do feel that these plugins are in a really good place to offer more opinionated bleeding edge feature features enabled by default yeah.

Rahul:

So to add to that like um so as there is some part which is plugin territory I feel like um the WordPress itself run as a part of like LAMP stack or LEMP stack and there are things that shouldn’t be the WordPress edited also like for example um if you can add like a full page cache using nginx or something like Redis or memcache you should try that uh like if you have you can have MySQL query caching or PHP op caching so there are multiple levels or layers where you can optimize performance and once you do that then leave the remaining things to the WordPress but so so I personally try to suggest that if you can move uh things like move performance related optimization at earlier level like before things reaches WordPress um that’s even better um.

Miriam:

I just like to add so I think that um one of the great things about WordPress is that every site is super unique right like you know no two sites are going to be the same they’re kind of like snowflakes and so to try to have in core optimization that applies to all of those snowflakes I don’t know if that’s ever going to be achievable um so I think the plugins will continue to serve a role as well um I’m just gonna come back to AI but potentially at some point in the WordPress admin it could say something to the user like be like an assistant like hey you know maybe instead of that plug-in which has these resource issues use that one or maybe you know you have this plugin installed click this setting and it will optimize your site like maybe at some point the user will get some kind of assistance from from AI but uh because of the snowflake situation I think the plugins will continue to serve a role.

Adam:

Cool are we at time? We have one time for one more question one more question okay I’m gonna do one more question then we’ll wrap up here so this is actually this is gonna this is the question that I didn’t give you guys ahead of time um so this is but it’s it’s easy so going beyond uh performance what is your dream or vision from for WordPress we’re at the 20-year birthday today or right now imagine we’re 10 years from now and WordPress is celebrating its 30th birthday what what does WordPress look like to you uh what is it doing so.

Miriam:

Um I’ve been in the WordPress space for about 15 years and um I brought my daughter Sarah to this conference the first time I brought one of my kids and she’s 19. and it’s been really interesting hearing her perspective as a young person as opposed to me an old timer and also when you’re in the industry for a long time you start to like not see things you know um from a fresh perspective and um what I think I would love to see is a situation where WordPress becomes appealing to younger people she’s been actually giving really good ideas to me like how do young people get influenced in terms of what they use what products they use so we don’t do this she’s like why do I why do I know about Wix um you know what do I know about Webflow but I never hear about WordPress this she’s like this is like a whole big world here and like in my day-to-day life it’s not something that ever comes across my radar so you know she threw out like TikTok influencers whatever I don’t know if we’re going that direction so there’s but and if we can but I think we need more exposure to the younger generation to get them in the door to start using it from one one side and then the other side is they are used to a certain type of user experience with the apps that they use on Instagram you click a button you have something online and you can create amazing media whatever and it would you know that’s the user experience that the younger generation expects and rightfully so they don’t want to think about servers or versions or upgrades or whatever and I don’t know how but in 10 years time maybe we can get to a situation where uh that’s kind of an experience that people can also get with WordPress so.

Rahul:

Uh like we have put a lot of effort on Gutenberg I think a big amount of effort of that scale can go to media management where so like image formats and optimizes in one part but um so so today like a lot of content creation especially collaborative happens outside WordPress like we build we make like copy editing in Google doc then image editing some in some other tools uh then video video editing leaving feedback for videos so a lot of content creation uh happens uh outside WP admin probably that in coming years will and should move to the WP admin uh and I think performance will play big role like many people use this different tools because um they have some performance trade-offs uh and also some featured trade-off so I think that’s a big opportunity for WordPress to to try to be that content hub where like you take pictures and by default you upload it on WordPress like media library and later on you decide when you go back your home or these three pictures I want to add to my blog post but rest of also I can keep in my media library so that your your like all the things about you your private notes your content so the WP admin can be your home on the internet.

Thierry Muller:

This question wasn’t written but I have many dreams but I’ll keep it really short and uh um you know one that I think is really important and that I hope we get to it’s not actually performance related but it’s the onboarding flow to WordPress and we’ve seen many hosting and plugins and stuff uh stuff like this trying to address this problem but related to what you were saying about younger generation and bringing people to WordPress you know my dream is just that as a user you can easily capture what is your goal on the web uh you know why do you choose the web over other platforms and really to have your website you know created with the necessary tools and set up that you need to have a good starting point you know and I would love to see that by default you know in core and so that would be a little dream like hey I wanna you know sell something and in three clicks you are able to add your products you know so that’s my dream.

Adam:

Thank you thank you so much to the panel please give them a very very big hand many interesting points came up but before I say anything anybody who has questions please there’s two microphones uh halfway up the stairs or down depending where you’re coming from so if anyone would like to ask a question to the panel please get to the microphone and get asking in the meantime I’m just going to say I’m delighted that we that certain topics came up such as sustainability and user experience as a designer which is also connected to accessibility of course because that means that we include everyone when the user experience is great and also something else but we were that I will I will mention in a minute because we’ve got questions have we yes please.

Audience Member:

Uh hello so Metro here uh you talk a lot about the Wix and other SaaS solutions but uh I think what we have to to work in with WordPress is uh the other version of static solution that goes like maybe well Strattic is another solution kind of a little different but they there are a lot of other CMS’s like Ghost that does the same thing uh with maybe less plugins but more JS related and uh I think it’s where is the performance and uh if we want to to to do good thing maybe WordPress has to go there a little well JS JavaScript CMS and uh so but can I can I answer yeah.

Miriam:

Well so um there’s a reason that WordPress continues to have larger higher market shares I think than those platforms and that’s because in the end uh the content management experience is so like straight streamlined and just powerful in WordPress and so flexible but it just I I don’t know if you’re aware but there is the REST API um in WordPress so people can build a headless decoupled implementation of WordPress user React front end or whatever they want to use although in my opinion I don’t know why anyone would use React for front-end for a website really just don’t like sometimes it’s developers making decisions because it’s cool and shiny but don’t let your developers make decisions because things are cool and shiny I’m just saying anyways but you can if you want to because we have the REST API so WordPress can give you that type of experience if that’s what you want and that’s the beauty of WordPress it’s very flexible you can use the standard version it could be decoupled it can be static with Strattic you got it all I think you should also be answering these questions you no longer the interviewer now if you can also you actually can answer I think we have a question on the right.

Audience Member:

Uh hi uh thank you for the discussion um I wanted to ask about WP admin which is a massive performance Wild Wild West at the moment that nobody seems to care about every screen loads about 160 resources of JavaScript and CSS no regard to context what do you guys think about that as a user experience problem for the WordPress platform because admins are people too thank you [Applause].

Thierry Muller:

Yeah it is definitely a problem and you know the way I personally look at it is we have many challenges and um which one do we pick first right and um you know there’s a lot of investment that’s going into improving the content creation on WP admin it’s true that from a performance perspective it hasn’t been that much of a priority although it should always be taken into consideration but you know like like I mentioned earlier on I think performance caring about performance is fairly new at the level that we are at now and it is true that for now the priority has been about trying to make WordPress websites in the front end so for the consumers uh better and not so much in the WP admin although there has been some improvement in WP admin as well this is not to say that it shouldn’t be done I think it’s just a matter of like priorities and how many resources or people and contributors um can can work on this so so not so much about saying like we shouldn’t it’s more like when and you know against other priorities um.

Miriam:

So this actually just came up I was looking for benchmark data comparing the WP admin performance because the focus around performance tends to be on the front end because in the end we want our websites to succeed and the success has a lot to or mostly to do with how people experience the website when they visit it so most of the focus tends to go towards how the front-end experience is in terms of performance but if the back end is slow then the user experience is bad and eventually that’s going to impact also how and if people even use WordPress I was not able to get any benchmarking data because again it doesn’t like it’s not a focus so I think that’s a really good question and it’s a good topic to bring up in terms of awareness even that it would be good to give some attention because it does create a poor user experience and in the end like I said earlier that’s what creates a sticky product or or just doesn’t.

Adam:

We have one more question I think yeah.

Audience Member:

Hi can you hear me okay so I I actually the conversation came up with uh like uh the difference between Wix and everything so for me as a user I believe that uh Wix and all other platforms they are actually really easy to use because like there are not much uh uh like plugins and uh like a lot of other stuff so in in WordPress although it’s good that we have like multiple themes and multiple uh options but the main problem uh like which I have seen with people facing is that like if they are for example working with the Elementor so and they will move to maybe Gutenberg or some other uh you know uh platform sorry or some other plugin uh editor so they will actually uh they have to learn it from the start so don’t you think there is uh like a gap in that one like maybe we need to uh strategize it so that like uh most people who are using gate so that not only developers can use it some lame uh people like normal people can also use that so yeah that’s my question thank you.

Miriam:

I think it comes back to what we were saying about the like the user experience maybe the younger generation um it uh Thierry Muller described like one click and I’ve got a site that does X um it’s maybe what WordPress needs is like this kind of very simple straightforward like experience that everyone can get out of the gate and then if they want something more complex then they can do it themselves but it’s just I’m just picturing even like almost like Instagram not exactly but something that’s just like this is what it is you can’t do much to it you can manage your content here get it live um you know add media add video add whatever you want and and that’s it so I I think there is a use case for that type of very very simple almost like limited uh user experience in WordPress because like you said it can be very confusing when people see the admin for the first time I mean I think it’s just like they don’t even know where to look first and then they’re like in the settings section there’s like what what is a permalink who uses permalink in everyday language right like you know and we’re so used to it so I think it’s a good point.

Thierry Muller:

The the fragmentation problem is definitely a problem and right now it is a problem that the burden is definitely put on the site owner so when someone creates a site it’s overwhelming the amount of plugins and things like this and it’s what makes WordPress beautiful put on the site owner so when someone creates a site it’s overwhelming the amount of plugins and things like this and it’s what makes WordPress beautiful is it’s very very capable um there’s a ton of extensions but it’s also what puts the burden on new users and people who are not really used to work with WordPress and and so it ties back to what I was saying about better onboarding you know how can we you know remove this burden from the site owners while keeping in mind that you know there’s an entire ecosystem around WordPress like all of you plugin developers and stuff like this also you know we we can’t just say like use this these 10 plugins right we need to keep in consideration that everyone needs to have a chance to submit the plugin and offer extendability and so how do we make it easier for the site owners whilestill you know being fair and to all plug-in developers it’s a difficult challenge to address but I do think that there is a lot more we can do maybe you know this is also the thing that AI could help with like saying like hey you know these type of sites with similar goals are using this type of plugins and there’s definitely a lot more guidance we can do yeah.

Speaker:

I think we’ve got time for one last question may I ask one 

Audience – hello uh my name is boyan I wanted to talk about images we all know that images are a very important factor

behind performance not just for WordPress but for the web as a whole and at the moment we are at the point in time where we’re sort of deciding the Next Generation image formats that we’re going to use to replace the Legacy formats that have we have been using for a long time .I know Adam has been driving the efforts of including Next Generation image formats in WordPress core so thank you for doing that uh I wanted to ask you about jpeg Excel specifically it has been a bit of a controversial format as of late um if you all don’t know the story basically Google decided to drop that format from chrome late last year which was met by the community with a bit of controversy one of the reasons that were cited was lack of Interest by the community uh although they’re having many companies that have supported jpeg XL and the reason that I’m mentioning it now is that just earlier this week there has been another major development where Apple indicated support for jpeg XL is coming in Safari 17 and all of their operating systems as well so I just wanted to get your opinion and if if you had a chance to play around with jpeg Excel and what do you think about it

Adam:

I guess I’ll take that one since it was almost directed at me yeah thanks for the question yeah big fan of modern image formats and I did see that announcement another recent announcement was uh Edge announcing support for aviff um I will just a little caveat that Chrome actually never had full support for jpeg XL it was hidden behind like a a flag so it wasn’t actually part of chrome it’s it’s a it’s a Nuance there but there was a lot of controversy about it being dropped I think part of the discussion is around in terms of support for on the web is around whether the advantages of jpeg XL over avif are significant enough to make it a viable additional format to support there is sort of a limit to how many different formats browsers can support there is some cost to doing that and the other thing about these formats that’s very interesting is that they’re not static like the avif and and jpeg XL algorithms keep improving so when you look at studies to try to see to compare the um it’s it’s difficult to look at them because you really have to look at the very current implementations um and also there’s a lot of nuance about what size image is it you know what are you using it on the web you know jpeg Excel has some features that are not available in other formats but to those really help us in on the webum I will say that that you know the recent decision by Safari was kind of a surprise I think and it might change how things progress there are some really cool things about jpeg XL that other formats don’t support but I I’m not 100 sure that they’re valuable to us as especially in WordPress given that the way we generate images is in PHP um at least right now and there’s no support for jpg XL and PHP um with avif you have to get up to I think PHP 8.1 to get the support but at least we’re moving in that direction so I think you know ultimately and we saw with webp it was very we did not adopt that as the default because there’s the other issue of besides can you see it on the web is like what happens when you download the image to your computer and then you try to use it somewhere else so this is the challenge that all modern formats face so right now I’m a big fan of webp because I think it buys us a lot of the improvements maybe not quite as much as Aviv and jpg XL but it’s also broadly compatible almost everywhere not you’ll never catch up to the Legacy formats but it is quite quite good in terms of compatibility so.

Speaker:

I’m creeping in to interrupt because I know that Adam you could carry on for another you know all day long talking about this but you’ll be around won’t you so and also I recommend to check out on WordPress TV work in Bangkok where there’s a talk by Adam on on images and also very interestingly a talk by Alberto Medina who I believe is your colleague Google is isn’t heabout exactly how do we turn WordPress into something that is as easy to use for younger Generations as Instagram and Tick Tock and all the rest of it so I really recommend that you do that thank you very much to alpano please give them the biggest hand ever thank you thank you very much.