Improvements in performance of block themes compared to classic themes

Welcome to Sustain WP, a limited podcast series about digital sustainability and WordPress. I'm your host Nahuai Badiola and in this episode I will be talking about what we can do to make WordPress more sustainable with 8 amazing guests.

In the previous episodes we introduced the 3 pillars of sustainability and in this episode we will use these lenses to explore what we can do better on WordPress, specifically in the CMS and community, since in the next episode we will talk about events.

This has been the most challenging episode to edit, by far. There were to many good ideas from a lot of people, but I didn't want to make an episode too long and I wanted to have a balance between the 3 pillars.

I manage to keep the episode a bit over an hour, maintaining the essence of all the ideas. I hope that sounds reasonable to you and your podcast listening schedule.

Luckily all the guests were already introduced on previous episodes so I'll just mention their name. Remember that you can see more info about them in the show notes.

Environmental

I start asking about how we could improve the environmental sustainability. Juan Hernando says that every byte counts and it's important to raise awareness about it.

Nora Ferreirós would like to see guidelines, even rules, to help designers and developers to create more sustainable websites.

In other hand, Birgit Olzem would like to see improvements in the CMS performance so we can save energy both at server-side and in end-user devices.

Tom Greenwood mentions that it's not easy to balance between simplicity and flexibility or to improve code taking into account the backward compatibility. He also thinks that there are some things in the CMS that could potentially be removed and add some improvements on caching. 

Since the performance team has been going a great work improving cache (specially in the last 3 major releases) I asked Adam Silverstein about some of the cool things the team has done to improve the CMS.

Then I asked him about the improvements on block themes performance.

Continuing with ideas that could improve WordPress sustainability, Tim Frick suggest to use W3C guidelines to create some kind of guide inside the CMS (or as a plugin) to raise awareness.

Social and economic

Continuing with Tim, but switching to the social part, when I asked him what we could improve in social sustainability he mentioned how there is always room to improve accessibility. He also talked about inclusive language and privacy guidelines for plugin and theme authors.

In other hand, Tom Greenwood highlights how WordPress it's doing some things quite well in several areas but may be it could use a revamp on the backend to be more intuitive. 

Talking about how we could improve the social part I asked Birgit Olzem about the WordPress DEIB working group. 

Then I ask her about what we could improve and we talk about the 3 funding methods for contributors that exist right now.

In the conversation with Birgit we mentioned the WP Community Collective. To give you a better context on how (and why) was created and what it is you can now hear Courtney Robertson, one of the cofounders. 

In this direction Nora Ferreirós talk about the possibility to pay freelance for specific tasks and the benefits she see on of having an alternative like WP Community Collective as complement to five for the future program.  

Another of the funding methods we mentioned before is five for the future, so I asked Hari Shanker to explain what it is and how we could improve it.

Continuing talking about companies Juan Hernando suggest we communicate better the big impact that could make sponsoring a contributor. He also realizes that it's also important to to display the results, measuring somehow the impact. That brought us to talk about the metrics dashboard proposal.

In the episode 3, Courtney Robertson already gave an overview about the dashboard proposal but I also asked Hari Shanker about it so you can have a bit more of context in this episode.

Very related to the dashboards topic Birgit mention that we could learn from CHAOSS community, as Courtney also suggested on episode 3.

To end with the guest interventions I leave you the reflexion of Juan Hernando about the importance of raising awareness and the idea of adding sustainability as a core value of WordPress.

I think that was a nice way to finish, but I might be biased since one of the objective we envisioned when started the WordPress sustainability initiative was to make WordPress a CMS that leads on sustainability.

Summary

As I said at the beginning the guests shared a lot of good ideas, covering a lot of ground and the 3 pillars, so I'll try to summarize the main points.

Starting with the environmental part, having a big market share give WordPress the opportunity to have a huge impact even with small actions or changes.

In that sense it's nice to see the work of the performance team that it's bringing improvements in every WordPress update.

Improve end user experience it's part of inclusivity and accessibility.

Also, creating guidelines, that have sustainability in mind, for plugin and theme creators could have a positive impact.

And thinking about end users, surfacing information the environmental impact of the website and adding some educational content or links inside WordPress could help raise awareness. Indeed this is one of the projects that it's ongoing in the Sustainability Team.

Moving to the social and economic part, we talked about the importance of having a diverse group of people contributing that also includes attracting new generations, something we forget sometimes.

In the area where social and economic part intertwined, we talked about the 3 ways to fund contributors that are ongoing right now: 

• Five for the future
• WP Community Collective
• Github sponsors

We also mentioned the idea of creating a portal to connect active contributors and companies willing to support WordPress. The idea behind would be to close the gap between contributors and companies and make easier to sponsor part-time contributors.

This is not a new interest but I really think that it has gained some momentum and we could use it to move it forward.

As we mentioned on the previous episode we have to take care both the economic and social part so the new contributors feel welcomed and we don't loose more active ones because of a burnout. 

We also talked about measuring the health of the project and the proposal for Make teams dashboards and how this metrics could also help to measure the return of investment of companies.

Choosing which metrics to use it's not an easy task, since some of them could be easier to surface than other (Github activity for example) but we should try to find the best way of doing it. As always feedback from the community is going to be key to move it forward. 

After hearing all the guests I really think that we have the ideas and the willingness to position WordPress as the CMS that leads on sustainability.

Resources

• CHAOSS community
• CHAOSS community podcast
• WordPress Make/Teams dashboard proposal
• Proposal for establishing a DEIB Team on WordPress community
• Five for the future initiative (WordPress)
• The WP Community Collective
• Github sponsors
• Github sponsor wp contributors (arooba)
• Web Sustainability Guidelines (W3C)
• Our Sustainable WP

Transcript

Nahuai Badiola I'm a WordPress developer, theme and plugin creator, I also write WP code tutorials and I'm passionate about web sustainability.

• WordPress
• Twitter
• Mastodon

Guests