Category: Web Performance

I’m thrilled to announce a new plugin from the WordPress Core Performance Team: View Transitions! This experimental plugin brings the power of the cross-document View Transitions browser API to your WordPress site, allowing for smoother, animated transitions between page navigations.

View Transitions?

Traditionally, moving from one page (or, technically, URL) to another on the web has always involved an abrupt, “hard” reload. While this might seem completely natural to many of us on the web, user expectations have shifted drastically in the past (almost) two decades.

Native mobile applications, with their seamless in-app navigations and smooth transitions, have set a new bar for user experience. This has led web developers to try to catch up with that experience, often turning to Single Page Applications (SPAs). While SPAs aim to mimic native app navigations by dynamically updating content without full page reloads, this often comes with increased development complexity and a shift in how you structure your entire website, often at the cost of accessibility or performance.

Now, with cross-document view transitions, you can achieve that desired user experience through smooth transitions on the web without any extensive overhaul of your website. And the new View Transitions plugin makes it super simple in WordPress.

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Two years ago today, on May 22, 2023, I opened an experimental pull request for a new module in the Performance Lab plugin. That little experiment was the very first step on a long road that ultimately led to the “Speculative Loading” feature landing in WordPress 6.8 last month (April 2025).

For those unfamiliar, the Speculative Loading feature enhances performance by speculatively loading pages a user is likely to visit next, which can make navigation feel almost instantaneous. If you want to dive into the technical nitty-gritty, I recommend checking out the “dev note” post on Make WordPress Core.

This post, however, isn’t about the what or how of the feature itself. Instead, I want to pull back the curtain and share the story behind the feature—the milestones, the discussions, and the collaborative effort that took it from a spark of an idea to a reality for millions of WordPress sites. The impact is considerable even for the entire web. Keep reading to the end for concrete numbers. 👇

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In my post from last month, I am sharing my experience from rebuilding my WordPress website using a block theme, including a performance comparison. As part of that post, I included a spreadsheet with a detailed performance breakdown from before and after the changes. I only provided a bit of context for how I conducted the performance comparison in that post, however as promised, in this post I am sharing the concrete methodology that I used and how you can use it to measure performance of websites yourself.

In order to better explain the methodology, I thought I might just do another similar kind of analysis that I would go over in this post. Last week, WordPress 6.2 was released, so no better opportunity than to measure how updating my website from WordPress 6.1 to 6.2 affects its performance!

I created a spreadsheet with the full data for this new analysis, and in this post we’ll go over the process for how I got that data in detail.

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