Topic
WordPress performance, measured on real production traffic.
Most WordPress performance advice is a checklist with no numbers attached. Install a caching plugin, enable compression, minify something, and hope the score moves. That is not how we work on client sites, and it is not what we write about here.
Everything in this topic starts from a measurement: query counts captured under simulated concurrency, transfer sizes before and after a change, LCP on a throttled mobile profile. When we say a pattern is slow, there is a number behind it, and when a fix does not help as much as expected we say that too. The recurring theme across these pieces is that the expensive problems are rarely the ones the popular tooling flags — unbounded queries on every request, missing indexes on custom tables, and synchronous external API calls in the request lifecycle cost far more than an unminified stylesheet.
Performance
2 articles in this topic
Why most WordPress plugins fail under production load — and how to avoid the same mistakes.
An analysis of 12 common WordPress plugins under real traffic conditions. Where they start to break down, why it happens, and how to identify the same patterns in your own stack.
Read more → PerformanceConditional asset loading deep dive: how we cut 40% of CSS payload on a WooCommerce store.
A walkthrough of identifying and eliminating unnecessary CSS from a high-traffic e-commerce site using a combination of plugins and custom logic.
Read more →