felix-arntz.me

Category: Web Performance

  • Leveraging the Power of Custom Elements in Gutenberg

    Leveraging the Power of Custom Elements in Gutenberg

    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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  • Vier

    Vier

    Last weekend I participated in WordCamp Europe 2019, my fifth one of these annual events for the European (and beyond!) WordPress communities to meet, exchange knowledge and celebrate themselves. This fifth WordCamp Europe also marks my fourth anniversary as part of the WordPress community, as the 2015 event in Sevilla was my very first interaction with the community. Hence, it is time for my annual personal recap of what has happened in the past 12 months.

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  • Introducing Feature Policy & Reporting API for WordPress

    Introducing Feature Policy & Reporting API for WordPress

    The web has been constantly evolving. Over the years we have seen milestones such as the introduction of responsive images, AJAX requests, or location access for some examples. More recently features like Add to Home Screen, which allows you to make websites easily accessible on your phone or desktop, or Web Payments, a standardized way of processing payments on the web, have been made available. Even lazy-loading media is likely to come natively to the web soon.

    While all these features are very powerful, they also pose the challenge of using them responsibly, and making sure to not abuse them, which could harm user experience. For example, asking the user to grant location access to a website without making it obvious what this would be used for and without providing a clear user benefit, the resulting pop-up can be more of a distraction than the purpose would justify it. I’m sure you have seen websites where you had to go through way too many pop-ups and consent requests before getting to the content you actually intended to see.

    Keeping track of all these web features can be a tedious task, especially in the context of a CMS like WordPress, where much of the codebase (probably even most of it) comes from third parties on many sites. Even if you yourself are a responsible citizen of the web, third-party plugins and themes might have flaws or might be misusing features in ways you aren’t  aware of.

    This is where two new proposed web standards, Feature Policy and Reporting API, come into play.

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  • Types, Subtypes, Meta, Options – An Abstract View On Data Structures in WordPress

    Types, Subtypes, Meta, Options – An Abstract View On Data Structures in WordPress

    This weekend, I gave a talk at WordCamp Portland, looking into data structures in WordPress. While the session will soon be available on wordpress.tv, in this post I will provide a written version of it. I recommend you to read this alongside the original slides.

    When referring to data structures here, it’s not data structures as in computer science. You won’t hear about arrays, doubly linked lists, binary trees. Instead we will look at object types, metadata and options, in other words, how data is organized in WordPress. We will do so from both the database and the code points of view. Knowing the ins and outs of this is crucial for both core contributors and plugin developers.

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  • I’m Joining Google

    I’m Joining Google

    I am very excited to announce that I will be joining Google as a Developer Programs Engineer in the Web Content Ecosystems team, starting in November. As you may have heard, Google is building a team particularly focusing on the WordPress platform, and that very team I am going to be part of – so I am not leaving the WordPress space. Quite the contrary: Google is heavily invested in improving the open web, and the popularity of the WordPress platform allows for wide adaption of such improvements. I will continue to contribute to WordPress, even more so, my new position will be entirely dedicated to the open web. In this post I would like to share some background on this step and what it means to me personally.

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