Google dedicates team to improving WordPress performance

Google is on a mission to improve the size, performance, and speeds of anything on the web. Google built AMP for mobile pages and is pushing page speed as a key ranking factor to encourage webmasters to treat loading times as a critical benchmark. Still, progress is slow, and the majority of the web still takes more than a few seconds to load. How do you get more websites to speed up? By focusing on the platforms that power most of them.

WordPress has at least 59% of the CMS market, which means that almost a third of all websites. If you can improve WordPress performance at the core level, you will speed up a third of the web.

There is a lot of cruft and bloat that WordPress has added over the years. Keeping an open-source project of that scale and size lean is difficult. Benchmarks show that WordPress lags non-WordPress sites in all aspects of site performance like Font loading, HTML, CSS, and images. WordPress sites load as much 20% more data than other sites.

This is where Google comes to the rescue. The search giant is putting together a team to optimize and improve the performance of WordPress as a whole. Here is the statement from Google:

“Our WordPress vision covers a lot of exciting work across the full breadth of the WordPress ecosystem: collaborating on WP core, developing themes, plugins, and WP-tailored tools and infrastructure, and engaging with the broader WordPress community of publishers.”