On the podcast today we have Felix Arntz.

Felix is a Developer Relations Engineer at Google and a WordPress core committer. He is the lead engineer for the Site Kit plugin for WordPress and has been a regular contributor to WordPress for several years.

He’s also been involved in the newly created WordPress performance team which is trying to work out how WordPress can stay ahead of the performance curve.

Despite the fact that WordPress’ share of the CMS market is very strong, third-party CMS’s like Wix and Shopify have been growing their customer base in recent years. As single platforms, they can be very focused upon performance and don’t have to worry about the possible performance issues which the plugin and theme architecture of WordPress brings. Is this something that we need to be concerned about? Are website clients beginning to ask more probing questions about performance, and is WordPress keeping up with the marketing and messaging?

He also talks today about why it’s important for the whole WordPress community to be thinking about performance when building any website. It’s no secret that Google and other search engines are very interested in making the web faster, and future rankings could well be boosted by having a performant site. So we talk through some of the ways that this can be achieved.

We also talk about Felix’s career, the fact that there’s an emerging industry of people who are able to work exclusively on website performance, and earn their living from this expertise. This could be in the writing of code, the optimisation of assets as well as the configuration of hosting options. Felix recommends some things which might be of use for people wishing to find out more.

It’s an interesting conversation about an area which is going to matter more and more in the months and years to come.

Useful links.

Site Kit Plugin

WordPress Performance Team kick off

The Performance Lab plugin has been released

Enhancing performance in an open-source CMS ecosystem