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 livestream:
And here are my slides:
I used the outline of my talk to write up extensive documentation for the plugin, so you can read that for everything I discuss in my talk and so much more.
I was really happy with the turnout! The room was mostly full with over 100 people and some standing in the back who couldn’t find open seats. And there was a lot of engagement with half a dozen questions asked during the Q&A followed by another dozen people who came up to ask questions and wanted selfies after the session. Thanks so much to everyone for attending!
My talk was essentially a sequel to my teammate Felix Arntzʼs talk (on WordPress.tv) at WordCamp US 2022, especially at 27:25:
Please install the plugin, specifically its dependent plugins Image Prioritizer and Embed Optimizer, and monitor what impact it has on your Core Web Vitals! Is this something which we should merge into WordPress Core?