Beyond Caching: How WordPress Core Keeps Getting Faster | Weston Ruter (WP Engine)

In Episode 31 of The Melapress Show, Weston Ruter — long-time WordPress Core Committer and Principal Engineer at WP Engine — joins Robert Abela to take a deep dive into how WordPress Core keeps improving its speed and performance. Together, they uncover the teamwork, engineering, and testing that drive each performance release — from the Core Performance Team’s collaboration to the experimental features developed in the Performance Lab plugin.

Key topics include:

• How the Core Performance Team identifies and prioritizes new improvements
• The role of Core Web Vitals (LCP, INP, TTFB, CLS) in guiding performance work
• How experimental features in the Performance Lab plugin make it into Core
• Real-world optimizations like responsive image handling, speculative loading, and bfcache
• What’s coming in WordPress 6.9 and how agencies can prepare for it
• Practical steps developers can take to make their plugins and themes faster today

🎙️ Guest: Weston Ruter, Principal Engineer at WP Engine

🎙️ Host: Robert Abela, Melapress