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 speculative loading is speeding up your WordPress website.
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So on the podcast today we have Felix Arntz. Felix is a Senior Software Engineer at Google, and a WordPress Core contributor from Germany, currently residing in San Francisco, California. He helped establish the WordPress Core performance team, and has been heavily contributing to its efforts. He has been using WordPress for a decade and contributing back to the project since 2015. More recently, he has stepped into the role of the inaugural performance lead for the WordPress 6.2 release, and subsequently of the 6.3 and 6.8 releases. In the latter release, he spearheaded development, and launch, of the new speculative loading feature, which is the focus of the podcast today.
Speculative loading is one of the most important, and yet, almost invisible performance enhancements of recent times. If you’re on WordPress 6.8, this new feature is already active on your site, working quietly in the background to make page navigation faster, but you might never know from the WordPress UI. There’s no menu, no toggle, and no obvious indicator to show