Hello everyone, welcome to cloud boot camp. I am Danish your host for multiple session and along with me Moiz and Miranda will also join uh to host some of the session. Uh I would like to say hey to everyone and I would like to see uh how many people are joining from different part of the world to make it interactive. If you all can drop your locations in the chat section so we can see how many people are joining from the different parts of the world. Uh I would like to say like from the uh previous year and a very positive feedback on the security boot camp uh we decided to continue the boot camp series and this year we are back with the performance edition and we have a great lineup of of guest speakers such as we have Sabina Dan we have Adam Silverstein medium shop and there are many others they are expert in the performance field and it is your chance to learn from them. So if I can see in the comment section. So we have people from USA, Nathan from India, uh Frank from Texas and we have Abu Bakr from Pakistan, Albania, New Mexico, Joshua from New Mexico, Khaled from Ky. So there are multiple peoples and it is it is good to see that we we have a global audience. They are joining from different part of the world. Uh before we begin with the session, there are a few things I would like to inform. Uh I would like to give a shout out to our partners. We have partnered with WP Rocket, GTMetrics, Equalized Digital, Uptime Robot, EWW, image optimizer and there are few other partners as well. Those who support us to bring this uh event in a live and I would like to also uh say like we activate the leaderboard. So you have a chance to climb the leaderboard. So there are multiple activities you can do to climb the leaderboard and you will win big prizes and we also incentivize this event. You can learn with the fun. So there are multiple activities as well. So you can participate in the activities and win big prizes. So the first session would be a keynote session by Sabina Zidan. uh and I would like to say about her like she is a performance expert and it’s her daily task to optimize the WordPress websites and the topic is uh the state of web performance in 2026 why speed is solved but performance isn’t. So we have Sabrina Zan on the stage. Hey Sabrina, how are you? Hello Danish. Uh I’m good. Thank you. Happy to be here. Are you excited about the event? I was asking like are you excited about the event as we have multiple people from all around the world. We have people from USA, from Greece, from India. I am super excited and especially knowing that it’s different time of the day everywhere and it’s Tuesday and thank you everyone so much for joining us. Uh so without a further ado uh the stage is yours Sabrina. Thank you. Thank you very much. All right. Hello everyone. Here I have my slides. I hope that everyone will go good. I will just hide this one. I’m really excited to see so many people coming from different parts of the world. What we’re going to talk today is the state of performance in 2026 and uh why speed is solved and performance is not. Let’s see one second. Uh Danish already introduced me. I will just say that improving performance of the websites my name is Brenda. Okay. Improving performance of the websites is my daily job but I also teach uh WordPress developers uh how to improve performance of the websites and since this year I am also teaching WordPress agencies how to make performance a part of their normal process of their daily work. Uh I love performance. I’m very excited about it and I’m excited to see all of you here. um drop something in the comments um that uh those people that share me share me passion my passion to um performance. All right, let’s see what we we’re going to cover today. We are going to see some numbers. We are going to see some big innovations especially those that came in 2025 2026 also. And we’re going to see the real state of web performance for now. But first before we start ah one thing uh while I’m talking and while we are in this presentation I have two polls prepared for you. I would ask the team to put the first poll on the screen. So while we are in the presentation you can answer the poll. I would greatly appreciate if you participate and we’ll see the results of both polls in the end of the talk. Can we have the poll on the uh on the screen please? Team Danish. All right. I think at some point at some point we will have polls uh on the screen. Let’s proceed with uh our topic then. Mhm. Just a sec. So before we start we need to get aligned on what we are calling performance. Just a sec guys. You see my slides and I do not. And now I I can see them as well. All right. Uh first we need to align what we are referring to as web performance because during the years the meaning of web performance has changed. Uh quick historic data in 201. thought about performance like um uh more about of a speed. If it loaded, if it loaded, it was fine. We measured the server response time and also we measured the total page load time. It was dark times. All right. And then in 2015 the shift that there was a shift uh where we started to measure perceived speed. It wasn’t important anymore how long did it take the entire page and all the assets to load. It started to be important how we felt, how fast it was and performance shifted from number of total uh seconds of um page load to perception. And then in 2020 and up until now we are in new era. It’s not about how fast it’s loading. It’s about what experience it was in general. How good was an experience? Because Google in 2021, you know, this introduced core web vitals and this shifted everything in performance world forever because we are not only thinking about the speed now we are interested about this p uh speed that we perceive largest contentful paint LCP right how fast it seemed to us then we interested about LCP cumulative layout shift if it was jumping or it was stable and we were able to to see what’s happening and we’re interested inpaction to next paint how interactive the website was on this load and now even more how interactive the site was after load and longer how interactive it stayed. So performance today is not about loading time. It’s about the entire user experience. Was it stable? Was it fast? And was it responsive? That’s what we can refer to as web performance for one person in this moment of time uh on this specific page. And corals refers to uh web performance as this experience for 75% of visitors on the website. Was the page fast, stable and interactive for 75% of visitors of the website? All right. Now when we are uh on one page about what performance is let’s see what are the contributors to performance I wanted to say like the what impact performance but also it’s uh such a synergical uh thing that it’s it this these things user the person who is opening the page the infrastructure meaning hosting server CDN where the site lives and the website itself they make such a big synergy now that it’s hard to and we’ll see this later it’s hard to separate one from another but we’ll try user um this means the device that they are using the connection that they are on their location the browser that they are using the infrastructure uh what I just said CDN hosting server all this protocols database all this stuff technical stuff that is not on the side of the user but it’s not the website itself and then there is a website itself I’m a WordPress person so I’m going to talk about WordPress specifically so the website itself in terms of WordPress means uh WordPress core but also uh theme plugins all the assets all the custom code uh third party um scripts API requests everything that is happening on the website and then we have the fourth layer or the fourth contributor to these three it’s the person who invest investigates performance. You and me, the person who is there to improve performance and this person now has possibilities that were never present before. We have lab testing like synthetic testing where we can replicate someone’s experience. We have coral vitals where we see the real user experience on this website. And then we have RAM um R U M real user monitoring tools where we can see specific things but we’ll get to it in a second. The important thing to understand that these four parts are working in synergy. And now let’s see how each of these evolved over the last 10 15 years and what exciting things have happened during the last two years in we are not going to go through everything but through the most important things okay so uh in terms of user in terms of device connection speed location browser very quickly but I guess you know this as well uh what it was in 2010 I As uh the majority of people who are here now remember it was mobile was just a mobile phone and sometimes maybe you can send uh something through the network but now uh in 2025 first time the mobile speed average this data is average global data uh mobile speed average mobile speed overtook took home internet, the broadband and this is incredible. It shows us how important for the world for us mobile speed is and how many possibilities this opens to us. So we have really cool speeds now. Now device uh I guess without any statistic you can guess that the device that you own today is so much faster so much better than it was 5 years ago or four years ago. The thing is that devices today like average devices today average Android phone today is faster than flagship phones five years ago. Uh here I brought the uh comparison of uh the average mobile Android mobile phone and uh it’s two times faster two times more powerful. Average phone is two times more powerful today than it was four years ago. We have a huge opportunity from there as well to be able to open more tabs, to load more stuff, to process more data through our phones. All right. And then browsers. browsers on our laptops, on our mobile phones. If in 2010 browser was just a renderer, it was just a place where you render whatever. Today, it’s a performance and shine. It does so many things for you to improve your experience. You probably heard that uh there there was um lazil uh lazy automatic lazy. We needed plugins for this before, right? For lazy loading, for back forward cache, for example, when you click before uh the page the way you were before and uh um forward these things. Uh then um uh for speculation rules uh speculation rules probably you heard that as well. This is when the browser predicts where you’re going to click next and it preloads this content for you before you click actually. These all were there up uh before uh 2025. But in the last two years these technologies they got developed in so much better way. For example, this uh back forward cache it before it didn’t include pages that had no store in uh uh that had no store headers. This meant that this particular fe feature was not available for locked in WordPress users for example for WooCommerce stores but now it does but now it is available uh since 2025. Then we have another thing that is called view transitions API. I really really wanted to show you videos of all this stuff, but we have so much time and there are so many things happen that happened during these last two years that I’m only going to give you like hints that you can Google later and use as a road map if you find something new here and I’m not going to show u specific things today. So view transitions API let us um transit through pages like if it was the same app uh like it’s animated it’s smooth it doesn’t feel like page is reloaded this what view transitions API does inside the browser then we have the speculation rules that I already mentioned and the important thing for WordPress users that this speculative loading, this predicting where the user is going to click is shipped uh in WordPress version 6.8 uh in April of the last year is built into the core. So without doing anything, we have that in WordPress core and now it’s really widely used. So browsers became really performance performance uh I don’t know engines not even helpers it’s not that they’re helping us they are engines that are handling performance stuff for us let’s see the next one how infrastructure evaluated CDM like 15 years ago 2010 Ten existed and Cloudflare existed but it was expensive, it was complex and it wasn’t benefiting all the websites. For example, they it wasn’t benefiting local websites that uh had fast servers next to them. It was uh before it was better to get fast if you are serving local audience. It was better to get local server next to you uh next to your audience and uh that was so much faster than having CDN especially that it was uh expensive. But now the situation changed because CDN now Cloudflare now has things that it never had before. For example, um, edge delivery. You probably heard about this. You probably heard the word edge delivery, but literally it means that it delivers the content not from the few points in the world, but from a lot of points in the world. Uh, they have I don’t know if I have this in slides. Yeah, I have this 330 locations today from where they deliver content and that makes possible to deliver websites to make time to first bite to deliver websites to establish connection to to server in less than 50 milliseconds. 50 milliseconds and before 600 milliseconds were kind of fine for reference we’re clipping uh to to make a clip with our eyes it’s 150 milliseconds and to deliver content now through cloud flare to start delivering this content to make a connection 50 milliseconds they also have u protection do protection all types of security stuff in their stack. Uh very important, very interesting thing that they have and it’s also very new. It’s called early hints. Um this like how happens the normal load of the page. HTML is loaded and then um browser receives the assets that we need to load CSS, JavaScript blah blah blah and it starts uh loading those ones. This is the normal order but with the technology that is called early hints server tells browser before it’s it finishes uh loading the HTML it’s it tells browser which CSS or JavaScript would be a good idea to load and that’s how browser can start loading uh like um before start loading these assets in few lines before the HTML has finished. This is a very cool technology that also impacted the server the server. Let’s get in it in a second. But Cloudflare this all this stuff it’s all available for us for zero for free for millions and millions of websites for free. And in 2025, the specific offer that Cloudflare has for WordPress users that is called uh APO for WordPress, it got a new uh breeze because it this plug-in APO for WordPress, it existed before but during years it was a little bit uh forgotten And um in the last and uh in 2025 it got a new update. It’s actively maintained again. And for $5 per month now we can get not only c all the things uh I mentioned before and caching of the assets but full page caching that is not included in free plan. Not only CSS uh images and JavaScript are cached but also HTML is cached which is great. Cool. This is the level of enterprise that is accessible for WordPress websites ac uh across the world for $5 per month. Incredible. Then server, what do we have with server? Uh let’s not remember those dark times when servers were really slow and everything. Let’s focus on what we have now. We have new standards now. uh it’s it’s uh really a new standard for any managed WordPress hosting today to have uh edge delivery that is powered by Cloudflare under the hood of the hosting that lets managed hosting promise you the level that Cloudflare promises time to first bite of 50 milliseconds. Then we have PHP. The latest version of PHP is 8.5. And the PHP 8 that we have now, it’s uh three times faster than PHP 5.6 that we had just 12 years ago. Then we have all types of caching including by default on our server. It’s very normal and very we expected very much from the hosting to have this to have op cache radius cache MySQL cache to to do PHP compilation database requests to do this once and then if the request is repeated not to do the same work two times and then in 2025 these um early hints when server tells the browser that it’s a good idea to download this CSS or this JavaScript while uh the HTML hasn’t finished yet before HTML has finished this technology was added to Ninx as native support which means that now managed WordPress hosting can have it as built in I I know that some hosting hostings are already have it as a toggle. You can enable it uh in the dashboard or it’s included uh by default. But this is these improvements they’re incredible and this is happening for 20 like this managed WordPress hosting might cost $20 per month. I guess the lowest tier at Cloudflare was at Cloudways was $14. Danish will correct me if it’s not true, but for $20 per month now, you get normally you get very fast, very responsive web server with all of this stuff. a quick look um quick look at PHP versions and benchmarks that are showing performance um performance improvement between versions. I would like you to note here one thing. PHP 5.6 was very long time ago, right? But very long time ago but uh if you and it’s a huge difference between 5.6 six and seven eight version. But between seven and eight version it seems in the in the graphs it seems that there is no big difference in in performance gains. But the there are really performance gains when you switch between when you update your version. Even if you have now 8.0 08.1 if you update you still have performance gains because how the engine handles caching this op cache is different uh how it handles simultaneous requests is different. Maybe there won’t be different if the site is low traffic, but if there is load on the website, switching to the higher version will show you performance gains. And that’s not even talking about that. Um, since 8.2, 8.2 is the oldest version that is actively supported. Now we’ll look again at this table a little bit later where we will see WordPress market share. How many WordPress websites are using which version? But if you have now uh PHP 8.08.11 still it’s a good idea to update to the latest versions and the latest version now is 8.5. Let’s see how WordPress the core itself has evol evolutionated sorry during these years. So in 2010 the core was shipping features and then it was your pain it was your job to figure out how to make this website fast. Then in 2020, WordPress started to catch up with all the performance stuff that is happening in the world. WordPress in the core introduced a lot of new things like uh this uh SCRC set for images where you can have images of different sizes loaded depending on the device that the user is using. So that you are not and there is no need to do anything manually. The image that is suitable for mobile is loaded when suitable for mobile and not the huge image image for desktop is lo is loaded. Then we had um lazy loading for images in built-in WordPress as well that supported the lazy loaded lazy loading from browsers and other things. But the most important thing that happened that in 2025 uh 2021 the WordPress core performance team was started. This means that there is a specific team inside WordPress core that is dedicated to make every release performant and to improve specifically this part of WordPress. They have uh a clear road map. They have weekly meetings and they have for today they have a lot of work done. Uh let’s see examples of this work. Now in 2025, the WordPress core has performance features, performance improvements shipped in every release. For example, uh in 6.8 8. In April 2025, uh WordPress started supporting speculative loading this um thing from browser when browser uh predicts where you’re going to click. Then in WordPress 6.9 another huge thing happened uh when u before in blog based themes we already have the loaded the conditional loading if the block is not used on the page it’s not loaded and it’s and its assets are not loaded but this wasn’t the case for classic themes and classic themes if you look at statistics they still are the majority of um still majority of the websites on WordPress are running classic themes that’s not blog based themes that’s why this improvement impacted a huge part of WordPress websites now uh if the block is not used uh on the page it’s not loaded and this works for classic themes as Then uh view transitions. This um feature from browser where you switch between two pages and the switch feels like fading in fading out very very nice and pleasant one not like a reload. This as well um is going to come in WordPress very very soon for admin pages. And also we have a free plug-in that let you do this for front end. The this all is work of WordPress core performance team and also they are releasing a lot of useful plugins and one of them are optimization free plugins optimization detective and image prioritizer plug-in. what it does the combination of these two and usually what they do they are releasing plugins that are available like plugins and if they see that this thing works well then it goes integrated it gets integrated into the core so this is the step to integrate this feature to the core these two plugins are uh working this way they identifying LCP image the image from the first screen the main the main um element on the first screen that impacts uh LCP in group of vital they identify this element for mobile and desktop separately and they prioritize it. It’s very important uh in performance to prioritize things properly. Everything that is on our on our first screen we want to be loaded as fast as possible. everything else should wait. So these plugins are helping to do this. In two words, WordPress core not each year, each month is getting uh faster and faster, more performant, impacting millions of WordPress websites. tooling uh tooling meaning for people who are investigating WordPress uh investigating performance issues and trying to make websites faster. Uh in 2010 what we had was page speed insights. Uh it was a number of recommendations do this don’t do this and check boxes that you are uh supposed to check. It was telling us nothing nothing nothing about uh this website specifically about the experience of users on on this website uh because it didn’t take in account anything uh not user device not location but it was better than nothing because before we didn’t have anything and then Google introduces core web vital and core web vital as I mentioned before changed everything I even FD I want to stop here for for for another moment to emphasize how important this change was for the entire um ecosystem. So in 2021 this happened corital became a ranking signal and page speed and site started to put corital results on the top before lighthouse results. That was uh uncomfortable. It was uncomfortable for many developers because you see like uh uh after all the hype that we had with page speed insights and this number of of themes were promoting them themselves themselves like this catching plugins were adding uh this page speed insights mode and blah blah blah. I think you remember this. This was crazy. But uh then you go to page speed insight to the updated version of page speed insights. You see your number of page speed and size which can be in green zone like 90 for example. And then you see core web vital not passing not passing core web vital which means for real users your website is not fast is not stable is not interactive. This was a little bit sad. And then uh Google uh added in Chrome Lighthouse report and now the professional testing what we were doing before with webpage test and other tools they became available for us uh on our laptops while working on the website. You can do this. You can put CDN, you can put VPN and pretend to be your user wherever it is. uh pretending to be from their country, from their part of the world. You can throttle connection in the uh chrome dev tools with uh using this lighthouse uh report. You can throttle connection. You can throttle even CPU and uh pretend to be a mobile located in Germany for example uh and using this connection and this gave incredible opportunities to reproduce the issues investigate and improve them. So only one part was missing. We had lab testing with this with lighthouse. We had core web vital as real user experience representation and then the tools like speed curve like debug bear by the way Matt from debug bear will be giving a talk I think later today or tomorrow uh at uh this boot camp as well I’m sure it’s going to be very interesting. So tools like this they combined three parts. They combined synthetic testing, lab testing with lighthouse core web vital which represents real user experience and RAM um real user monitoring where you can see the specific group of users struggling with specific thing and therefore you can replicate this and improve. This shifted how we use all these tools, how we work on performance forever. And now in 2026, what we have the main thing of course it’s AI. Um I guess many of us uh I guess many of you already saw it. Uh I made video before about it that there is AI support right in Chrome development tools like you are seeing long task happening your website and you immediately can can ask Gemini what’s happening what is blocking what’s going on another thing you can take all this data from debug bear and speed curve for example and you can fit I’m sure this is going to be soon an inbuilt feature, but now you can do it yourself and you can feed this data to AI so that AI analyzes the trends for you and uh maybe find something that you haven’t noticed. Uh this is a huge huge help as well. And then another uh important update from 2025 that core web vital went cross browser crow uh core web vital are supposed to give us the information about real user experience on our website but before the last year this was only collected from Chrome browser. So it wasn’t collected from Safari, it wasn’t collected from uh Firefox, but now it is collected from Chrome, Safari and and um Firefox. And this is for LCP and INP. And this is really uh the demonstration of real users experience on the on the website. Not only users using Chrome browser but also others uses as well. These are huge updates of these last two years. So as of 10th of March for today 2026, we have devices twice as powerful as four years ago. Service three times faster and three times cheaper than 5 years ago. Free cloud flare CDN uh with 50 milliseconds uh time to first bite. Then we have browsers suddenly um guessing where you’re going to click before you do the click. Then we have PHP8 with op cache with radius cache with a server stack that was unimaginable five years ago for this money. We have WordPress shipping performance improvements in every release. We have three layers of monitoring synthetic um uh from uh Chrome user experience report like real users data and also real user monitoring where we can see them real time and on top of this we have AI that reads the performance data and can help us to fix any per okay not any but a lot of performance issues. So, why is your favorite restaurant website is still loading under six seconds? Well, not only that one, not only your favorite restaurants website, but many many others. Let’s look at stats. PHP version and adoption of PHP by double by WordPress websites. 56% of WordPress websites are running on the versions of WordPress that are end of life which mean or dead which means that there are no security patches there is no active support there is nothing only 2% of all WordPress websites run on the latest versions on the PHP P 8.4 and 8.5. Most of the hosts support and encourage users to update to 8.3. The upgrade is free. It takes one click. There is not not much change between code in previous version and this and still 82% of the websites haven’t done it yet. Then 52% of WordPress websites are not passing corital on mobile. The two graphs that you can see in this um report they are the number of websites based on WordPress and other technologies passing core web vital. As you can see, WordPress is doing worse than old technologies in general. And there are no there there there is no difference between the entire uh between the entire world and WordPress websites. And then 35% of regular websites regular websites are using Cloudflare only 35% while one uh one,000 uh most popular top 1,000 websites 70% of them are using Cloudflare or other CDN. And this is uh with five not even talking about free version or not even talking about this APO for word for WordPress for $5 per month not even using uh free version of Cloudflare. So of March 10th, 2026, we have all these beautiful things. We have all these beautiful things available to us and still one of two websites are failing core with vital mobile and 30% of WordPress websites are running on PHP versions that are old, outdated and not secure. So where is the gap? Let’s let me take a look if we have results of the poll. I do not think that we have results of the poll sadly. But all right. Uh I’ll give you 10 seconds to think. Have you heard about all these technologies that I mentioned just now before this talk? Have you heard of any of these um view transitions, this speculative loading, um all these innovations? Have you heard sorry uh have you heard of any of these before? You probably have heard many of you I’m sure have used some of this before before this talk. Um so first we have we clearly have the technology to achieve quick websites quick fast responsive websites already. The cost we saw that it’s it’s not the problem. the knowledge is also is there. Uh if we had a poll, we would have it more like in a scientific way, but I’m sure that you had that you have heard about some of this before and probably even used it. Let me open just this. But where is the gap then? I’ll give you a few seconds. to guess where it is. And if you have the ideas, could you please drop your ideas in the chat? Because me, it took 8 years to realize where the gap was. Maybe you can do this in a few seconds. Just one second. Okay, back on track. Where is the gap? So yes me it took it eight years to realize uh doing performance work to find it because uh I’m not only doing u performance work I’m also teaching performance to other developers and uh teaching also uh usually I’m invited by WordPress agencies to teach performance to their developers and while I can teach other developers performance and they can definitely improve performance of the website uh after of the websites after I understood after all these years that this is a drop in the ocean. this knowledge and their good results, they stay private to them and that specific client if the agency doesn’t have a system to follow to make this a process. Meet the bottleneck, please. Bottleneck is any WordPress agency that treats performance as firefighting that only does performance when clients client comes and says that their website is down because of uh black Friday sale or I don’t know what something happened. That’s when when they remember about performance and it’s not a process. What is the problem? They do not have delivery system. They don’t have monitoring system. They don’t have prevention system and no system to maintain good results after those good results are there. after they already have passed core web vitals and have websites beautiful and uh and healthy they don’t have system to maintain that and also they don’t have revenue from this because often times what I see that they sacrifice free hours to work on performance issues. Uh this year I put myself on a mission not only to teach performance to WordPress developers but also to teach WordPress agencies to make performance as a part of their business well and make recurring revenue from it because without revenue agency won’t uh invest in this thing. That’s what I needed eight years to understand people that that came to this conference today. Uh I guess you guys just the same gigs as I am about performance. You’re following news. You are looking uh for the new ways, new technologies and everything. But the problem is that we are collectively first it’s very few of us and second we are trying to improve performance of the websites of those 5% of the websites that are already fast. We want to make it even faster even cooler to do more things in more performant way and this is great but this doesn’t change the system. What changes the system and what really can make the web faster, more stable, more secure is when there is a system in the provider of the service. When the provider of the service or WordPress agency has performance not as a as a back thought but as a part of their daily work. Uh after this talk uh later this week I’m going to release a guide how free guide uh how uh five ways how WordPress agencies are making are turning complaints about performance into revenue. Uh I put I put the QR code on the screen. you can uh uh subscribe to so so that I send it there. I would love if you share this with people who you think might benefit with it and this way we can do WordPress uh faster really because every time when I see this news WordPress core got this percent faster. I don’t know how about you but I feel a little bit sad because when WordPress core gets a little bit faster it doesn’t mean that majority of WordPress website will feel that because that 200 millisecond improvement in the core it affects a lot of website but in a very small percentage if they were loading before in 4 seconds that now they are loading in three sec 3.8 8 seconds. This doesn’t change a lot. Uh thank you for your interesting performance. Um I guess slides for this talk. Cloudways. Ah, you’re here D. Yeah. Uh thank you so much Sabrina for the insightful session and I hope the viewers have a lot of takeaways that they can implement in their business. Uh there are a lot of questions for you. I can see in the Q&A session but we are right on time. We have another session with Amber Hinn. So, uh I would request you to stay active in the chat and the Q&A session because there are tons of questions for you from the viewers. So, feel free to answer all of those questions. So, uh for the audience, it was Sabrina Zan uh and I was the one who is following her for the performance tips. So, do follow her on Twitter and on LinkedIn. she is very active on the performance side. Uh we have another session coming up for the accessibility how accessibility drive down your core core web vitals with with ember hints. So we are coming back in few minutes so stay tuned. Thank you everyone. Cheers.