As I was saying…

Big thanks to @weston.ruter.net for joining me on the ✨ SPDY STREAM 009 ✨ yesterday. Lots of details were shared about the progress on the #WordPress platform re: performance. This should edited for next week.

I love this new post from Speed Kit. They divide up the 2.5-second “Good” threshold for LCP into two additional thresholds: Instant (300ms) and Fast (1000ms), while the current Good threshold becomes merely “OK”.

Just landed in WordPress trunk: scripts and script modules can be registered with a `fetchpriority` arg, and the Interactivity API script modules and comment-reply script use `low` by default. This can improve LCP by ~7% when the LCP element has an image: core.trac.wordpress.org/changeset/60...

I've joined @wpengine.com to contribute full time to WordPress core, continuing the performance work I started while at Google:

I just presented “The Site Speed Frontier with Performance Lab and Beyond” at WordCamp US. Shortly before my talk, I published a companion blog post that has 10x the information I had time to share, and I've just added an embed of the livestream: weston.ruter.net/2025/08/27/t... #WCUS

My blog has reached a web performance milestone: It's now in CrUX for both mobile and desktop (at the origin level), and it passes the CWV assessment for each! But the web performance journey isn't over…

I've just made some updates to my Portland picks post for WordPressers coming to my town for #WCUS: weston.ruter.net/2024/09/12/m...

I've published a new WordPress security plugin: Strict CSP. It helps mitigate cross-site scripting (XSS) vulnerabilities on the frontend and login screen (but not yet in the WP admin):

¡Qué logro, ¿no?!

I've been enjoying Gemini Code Assist for GitHub. It is a very helpful AI code reviewer! I just learned it supports configuration via a .gemini/ directory, allowing you to provide a style guide. I've put together an initial one for my WordPress plugins: github.com/westonruter/...

If you're using Additional CSS (Custom CSS) in the Customizer and have a Block Theme active, you may have noticed that live preview hasn't been working. This will be fixed in the next version of Gutenberg (21.4):

Planned performance improvements for WordPress 6.9, including: • script fetchpriority • output buffering • bfcache • CSS minification/inlining And more:

Do you like instant navigations on the WordPress frontend? Speculation rules! What if speculative loading was also in WP Admin? Check out this new experimental plugin that adds prerendering with moderate eagerness for links in the Admin Menu and Admin Bar:

If you've liked Speculative Loading with prerendering, you'll like this: The new “No-cache BFCache” plugin for WordPress enables instant back/forward navigations, particularly while logged in.

In one of my Duolingo lessons for Spanish, I encountered a word I hadn't used before: “conocedor”. But I quickly recognized its meaning since it just has the -edor agent suffix for the verb “conocer” which means “to know”.

Weston Ruter wrote about how to improve LCP by deprioritizing Script Modules from the Interactivity API. This is a really lovely deep-dive into the issue, the research, and the result, the plugin that fixes it. weston.ruter.net/2025/05/26/...

Really excited to see how the adoption of PHPStan will improve the quality of the WordPress codebase. Static analysis FTW!

I realized I could use Veo 3 to generate heartwarming AI videos of bison 🦬 (my favorite animal). But in order to share them, I had to first fix a problematic layout shift in the Video block, hopefully improving the CLS passing rate of WordPress along the way!

For the first time ever, I've just seen my blog appear in field metrics from CrUX (Chrome UX Report), albeit in desktop only and for the origin not an individual URL. Baby steps. In any case, Core Web Vitals Assessment: Passed ✅ pagespeed.web.dev/analysis/htt...

I've been doing a deep dive on the performance of script loading in WordPress. Adding fetchpriority=low to script modules and moving them from the head to the footer can improve LCP by >9%! Plugins available to implement now, and a WP core PR is drafted. Full writeup:

Please don't tell Duo. 🤟

Great writeup from @felixarntz.bsky.social on how Speculative Loading (the Speculation Rules API) landed in WordPress 6.8. I was heavily involved in this project. Looking forward to seeing the performance impact on LCP and to further iterating on it now that the initial version is in core!

When rebuilding my blog with a block theme, I was surprised to find the Featured Image block doesn't support caption or lightbox, like the Image block does. I wrote two little plugins to implement these until they land in Gutenberg / WordPress core:

I've done some retrospection and written up a history of my WordPress contributions. Next week marks a decade since I became a core committer. Now that I've been laid off from Google, I'm looking to find a sustainable way to continue contributing:

This is also true for me: my position at Google was eliminated. I found out yesterday on my commute home from the PDX office which I love so much. It was a dream job in every way. I'm still processing, but what @nerdy.dev wrote resonates closely with me, so I'll just say "ditto" for now. #opentowork

Why is Bluesky's Discover feed so bad for me? I've spent a lot of time voting up and down the posts I want to see on my feed, but still the vast majority of the posts it feeds me I'm not interested in. The Threads algorithm is much better, I'm sorry to say.

Upgrade your forms with <select> elements beyond the browser default ↑ This guide teaches you how to: ⌨️ Support keyboard navigation 🔆 Preserve focus states 📖 Ensure screen readers can understand the custom control Start customizing now 👇 developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/...

Happy 21st birthday to Gmail! On April 1, 2004, Gmail was launched. #InternetHistory

Proof of concept using Popover and Anchor Positioning to enhance Footnotes in WordPress, replacing footnote links with footnotes that open in popovers when you click on the footnote ref (avoiding a lot of jumping back and forth from the end of the content): github.com/WordPress/gu...

Experimenting with the Popover API including popover=hint and a polyfill for Interest Invokers to implement rich tooltips for an <abbr> element: codepen.io/westonruter/...

Lazy loading background images, just one of the optimizations already implemented in the Image Prioritizer plugin for WordPress: wordpress.org/plugins/imag...

On the heels of @felixarntz.bsky.social's WP 6.8 Dev Note yesterday and @tunetheweb.com's implementation guide posted today, I wrote up how to extend Speculative Loading in WordPress to enable more instant page loads:

Speculative Loading is coming to WordPress in 6.8, unlocking huge potential to boost your site's performance. The dev note explains how you can prepare your WordPress plugins for the new feature and how you can get the most out of it for your site: make.wordpress.org/core/2025/03...

Super stoked for this! Optimization Detective is innovative like few plugins, and it is going to revolutionize how we approach WordPress performance from a technical perspective. But don't take my word for it - check out Weston's #WCAsia talk to see it for yourself!

Check out my upcoming talk (in 2 days) at WordCamp Asia (livestreamed) to learn about the future for how performance optimizations can be implemented today in WordPress via the Optimization Detective feature plugin! #WCAsia

I had a nightmare last night that I took off my Pixel Watch to charge and in its place I put on a glow-in-the-dark yo-yo watch. In my dream, I woke up to realize I forgot where I had left my Pixel Watch and I couldn't tell the time from the yo-yo! Thanks to Gemini, I've visualized my dream. 🪀

Invoker Commands in WordPress pascalbirchler.com/invoker-comm...

YouTube Premium’s 4x speed and other experimental features now available to subscribers

Finally!!! "Faster playback speeds on mobile: Soon, you will be able to fine-tune your viewing experience with expanded playback speed options up to 4x on mobile devices."

“Do you see the red symbol on the Ruter?” Yes. #duolingo

🎉 OMG OMG OMG Chrome is shipping CSS attr() for every property!!! 🎉 I’ve been asking for this for over a decade!! w00t!!! 🤩 developer.chrome.com/blog/advance...

New in Chrome 133 – which goes stable on Feb 4 – is a new method to move an element around the DOM. Unlike the classic way of removing+reinserting a node, this moveBefore method preserves the element’s state! Iframes remain loaded, animations don’t restart, … DEMO: codepen.io/bramus/full/...

I beg to differ. This Ruter is fully functional. #duolingo

Astrophotography using Night Sight on a Google Pixel 9 Pro with a 4-minute exposure. The bright object in the upper left of center is Jupiter and the constellation Orion is below it. Location: Sisters, Oregon 🌠

Some of my best Christmas memories are from spending the season in Kraków in 2010 with my wife and firstborn. 👨‍👩‍👦🎄❄️🇵🇱

Now that content-visibility is "Baseline newly available", I've been meaning to explore how it can improve page rendering performance and how Optimization Detective can be used to apply it automatically in WordPress. 🧵 web.dev/blog/css-con...

An epic Performance Lab v3.7.0 release to close out the year, with 8 separate WordPress plugin updates: github.com/WordPress/pe...

This slide was shared by @felixarntz.bsky.social in the WordPress Performance Team end of year hallway hangout today. Really impressive to see how big of an impact auto-sizes is already having on sites that upgraded to WP 6.7.

Instagram knows me so well. Just what I had my eye on for the living room! 🚰