Blog
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Eliminating Layout Shifts in the Video Block
Like the rest of the internet, I’ve been awestruck by the quality of Google’s Veo 3 AI video generator (even with audio). As you’ve seen from my posts, the American bison 🦬 is my favorite animal (aside from my cat of course). Also, perhaps I’ve watched too many videos from the Mustache Farmer, but I…
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Improve LCP by Deprioritizing Script Modules from the Interactivity API
Adding a fetchpriority of low to script modules and moving them from the head to the footer can improve LCP by >9%! I’ve written plugins you can use to implement this now while waiting for them to land in WordPress core. The past week I’ve been doing a deep dive into the performance impact of…
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Adding Caption & Lightbox to the Featured Image Block
Earlier this year I re-built this site using the Twenty Twenty-Five theme, finally adopting a block theme over the veritable Twenty Twenty classic theme I had been using. In this rebuild, one thing that I had trouble with is the featured image. In the Twenty Twenty theme, a caption is rendered under the featured image…
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A Decade as a Core Committer: My WordPress Contribution History
Next Tuesday is my 10-year anniversary of becoming a WordPress core committer back on May 20, 2015. This post is somewhat of a résumé for my contributions to the WordPress project. I joined Google in 2018 to work full time on WordPress. After 6½ years, my sponsored contributor position there has been eliminated. I’m hoping…
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Eagerly Prerender Key URLs with Speculative Loading in WordPress
Speculative Loading is coming to WordPress 6.8. The Speculation Rules API enables browsers to prefetch or prerender URLs so that pages can load much faster for users. Prefetching can reduce your TTFB to zero, and prerendering can reduce your LCP to zero: instant navigation! As explained in Prerender pages in Chrome for instant page navigations,…
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Boosting Performance with Optimization Detective
At WordCamp Asia 2025 today in Manila, I gave a talk about the future for how performance optimizations can be implemented in WordPress today via the Optimization Detective feature plugin. This project has been the focus of my work for the past 1½ years on the WordPress Core Performance Team. Here’s my talk from the…
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My Portland Picks
I was surprised and delighted at the announcement that WordCamp US would be held in my hometown of Portland, Oregon this year—and next year too! Since so many of my teammates and colleagues converge for this yearly event, I really hope everyone gets a chance to enjoy aspects of the city I love. To that…
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Ergonomically Running WP-CLI in wp-env
Something that has always annoyed me is how verbose it is to run WP-CLI commands in wp-env projects. For example, to list out all posts: The “npm run wp-env run cli” part I have to copy for each command, and I often forget the right order or miss a component. It gets worse when needing…
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Repairing wp-env’s Testing Database
Sometimes when I interrupt PHP unit tests in a wp-env environment I end up getting the database in a bad state so that the next time I try to run tests I get: I then have to re-remember what I do to fix this every time, so I’m blogging it so I won’t have to…
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Running PHPUnit Automatically During Development
Recently I’ve been working on writing unit tests for a new module for the Performance Lab plugin. I realized my workflow was not particularly refined: I kept making a change to the codebase and then switching over to the terminal to re-run PHPUnit by hitting ↑ and Enter. I figured this should be done automatically…