Transcript
[00:00:19] Nathan Wrigley: Welcome to the Jukebox Podcast from WP Tavern. My name is Nathan Wrigley.
Jukebox is a podcast which is dedicated to all things WordPress. The people, the events, the plugins, the blocks, the themes, and in this case how WordPress Core continues to strive to unlock greater performance.
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So on the podcast today, we have Weston Ruter. Weston is a longtime WordPress user and contributor. He has been a core committer for 10 years, and he co-led the WordPress 4.9 release. He worked in the WordPress agency space, and has also been sponsored to work on the Core Performance Team. He lives in Portland, which as you will hear, was quite handy for this interview.
We start the conversation by getting into the big picture, why website speed matters more now than ever, and how WordPress performs out of the box. Weston shares details about measuring true performance. Revealing, for example, that achieving a perfect Lighthouse score isn’t the end game, and that real user experience metrics like Core Web Vitals and Largest Contentful Paint should shape how developers and site owners think about optimization.
Throughout the episode, you’ll learn about the advances made by the WordPress Performance Team, from lazy loading and new image formats, to speculative loading that shaves precious milliseconds off page transitions. Weston explains how