What is the WordPress Performance Lab plugin?

Finally, a performance-related feature from WordPress!

Having an official plugin directed at increasing the performance of WordPress and new functionalities is a good sign that WordPress is being taken more seriously. This will definitely help the WordPress community to improve and even out the performance of websites.

What is the WordPress Performance Lab plugin?

The WordPress Performance Lab plugin is a collection of modules focused on enhancing the performance of your site, most of which should eventually be merged into WordPress core. The plugin allows you to test the modules to get their benefits before they become available in WordPress core and to provide feedback to further improve the solutions.

How it works

The plugin is fairly simple to use but does require some setup. Enabled modules are not active until you activate them in the Performance Lab menu, and each module can be enabled and disabled independently.

WordPress Performance Lab features:

Enable WebP Uploads
Creates WebP versions for new JPEG image uploads if supported by the server.

Enable Audit Enqueued Assets (experimental)
Adds a CSS and JS resource check-in Site Health status.

Enable WebP Support
Adds a WebP support check-in Site Health status.

Enable Persistent Object Cache Health Check
Adds a persistent object cache check for sites with non-trivial amounts of data in the Site Health status

Why should You use this plugin over other similar solutions?

“The WordPress Performance Lab plugin is a collection of modules focused on enhancing the performance of your site, most of which should eventually be merged into WordPress core.”

This plugin helps you find out what could be causing low performance on your site and then provide solutions for it.

There are many free and premium tools such as WP Rocket and W3 Total Cache available for WordPress, but the unique feature of this plugin is that it includes several enhancement modules that could eventually become available in the WordPress core.

The Performance Lab plugin is currently in active development and still has a long way to go before being finished.

What are some pros and cons of using this plugin?

Pros:

• This plugin helps you understand site performance and then provides solutions for it.
• May give WordPress sites a significant advantage over other content management systems.
• Provides easy open access to development progress and feature enhancements.
• Can be used to test out new features before they are available in WordPress Core.
• Can be used to offer suggestions and feedback to developers who are working on the
  plugins.
• The plugin is fairly simple to use but does require some setup.
• People can submit their feedback to the plugin developers.

Cons:

• Some modules are still being developed and they may be removed in the future.
• Some of the modules may not become available in WordPress Core yet either.
• Lacks some features but will evolve over time according to the authors.

There are pros and cons to each independent feature on this plugin so they can all be tested individually until you find what works best for your website.

What’s the future of the WordPress Performance Lab plugin?

The team is working on extending the plugin with new features and capabilities and more modules. In the future, the plugin will be tested extensively on specific types of sites and client websites. Users are welcome to report their own results too, and they can help with further development.

What’s Next?

The Performance Lab plugin is still young but is a good starting point for performance-related capabilities in WordPress. We’re looking forward to the release of features and functionality that we hope will help improve the WordPress community.