WordPress announced that its Performance Lab plugin (Performance Lab WordPress plugin) is officially out of the Beta testing stage and is officially released as version 1.0. This means that the Performance plugin is considered stable and that there should be no infrastructure bugs and that it is considered ready for testing performance improvements before they are released within the WordPress Core.
“The first stable version 1.0.0 of the Performance Lab plugin has been released. You can download it from the WordPress plugin repository or via GitHub.
The official announcement noted:
The stable release means that the Performance Lab plugin’s infrastructure is now out of beta testing stage.”
What is the Performance Lab Plugin For?
The purpose of the plugin (Performance Lab WordPress plugin) is to give publishers the opportunity to best test new performance-boosting improvements and features that are being considered for a future release of the WordPress core, the main WordPress files that powers websites.
This allows publishers to acquire advanced previews of improvements that could be included by default within future versions of WordPress.
The hope is that the WordPress publishing community provides feedback on the improvements that in turn helps the performance team understand how well the improvements work and if viable include them in the next versions of WordPress.
The Performance Lab plugin can provide a boost in website performance, that’s the purpose of the plugin after all, but it’s important to be aware that the different improvements are still meant to be considered as advance previews of possible features to be included in a future version of the WordPress core.
Performance Lab WordPress plugin
The Performance Lab plugin is a collection of modules focused on enhancing the performance of your site, most of which should eventually be merged into WordPress core. The plugin allows to individually enable and test the modules to get their benefits before they become available in WordPress core, and to provide feedback to further improve the solutions.
Currently, the plugin includes the following performance modules: Performance Lab WordPress plugin
- WebP Uploads: Creates WebP versions for new JPEG image uploads if supported by the server.
- Persistent Object Cache Health Check: Adds a persistent object cache check for sites with non-trivial amounts of data in Site Health status.
- Audit Autoloaded Options: Adds a check for autoloaded options in Site Health status.
- Audit Enqueued Assets: Adds a CSS and JS resource check-in Site Health status.
- WebP Support: Adds a WebP support check-in Site Health status.
