[00:00:00 ] Nathan Wrigley: Welcome to the Jukebox podcast from WP Tavern. My name is Nathan Wrigley. Jukebox is a podcast which is dedicated to all things WordPress. The people, the events, the plugins, the blocks, the themes, and in this case why performance matters when creating WordPress websites?

If you’d like to subscribe to the podcast, you can do that by searching for WP Tavern in your podcast player of choice, or by going to WPTavern.com forward slash feed forward slash podcast. And you can copy and paste that URL into most podcast players. If you have a topic that you’d like us to feature on the podcast, I’m very keen to hear from you and hopefully get you, or your idea featured on the show. Go to WPTavern.com forward slash contact forward slash jukebox. And use the contact form there.

So on the podcast today we have Felix Arntz. Felix is a developer relations engineer at Google and a WordPress core committer. He’s the lead engineer for the Site Kit plugin for WordPress, and has been a regular contributor to WordPress for several years. He’s also been involved in the newly created WordPress performance team, which is trying to work out how WordPress can stay ahead of the performance curve.

Despite the fact that WordPress’ has share of the CMS market is very strong, third party CMSs like Wix and Shopify have been growing their customer base in recent years. As single platforms they can be very focused upon performance and don’t have to worry about the possible performance issues, which the plugin and theme architecture of WordPress brings. Is this something that we need to be concerned about? Are website clients beginning to ask more probing questions about performance? And is WordPress keeping up with the marketing and messaging?

He also talks about why it’s important for the whole WordPress community to be thinking about performance when building any website. It’s no secret that Google and other search engines are very interested in making the web faster. And future rankings could well be boosted by having a performant site. So we talked through some of the ways that this can be achieved.

We also talk about Felix’s career. The fact that there’s an emerging industry of people who are able to work exclusively on website performance and earn their living from this expertise. This could be in the writing of code, the optimization of assets, as well as the configuration of hosting options. Felix recommends some things which might be of use for people wishing to find out more. It’s an interesting conversation about an area which is going to matter more and more in the months and years to come.

Typically when we record the podcast, there’s not a lot of background noise, but that’s not always the case with these WordCamp Europe interviews. We were competing against the crowds and the air conditioning. And whilst the podcasts are more than listable, I hope that you understand that the vagaries of the real world were at play.

If you’re interested in finding out more, you can find all of the links in the show notes by heading over to WPTavern.com forward slash podcast, where you’ll find all of the other episodes as well.

And so without further delay, I bring you Felix Arntz.

I am joined on the podcast today by Felix Arntz. How are you doing?

[00:03:59 ] Felix Arntz: Pretty great. It’s amazing to be back at the in person event. It’s crazy.

[00:04:03 ] Nathan Wrigley: There are 2000, I think 2,700 people and it actually feels like a lot more, but it’s a spectacular event.

You are working at Google. Am I right in saying that? What’s your role over at Google?

[00:04:13 ] Felix Arntz: I’m a developer relations engineer, so yeah, I work on specifically focused on content management systems. Like of course WordPress, primarily. So yeah, I’m working in the, primarily in the WordPress ecosystem.

[00:04:25 ] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah.

[00:04:25 ] Felix Arntz: And, my two main projects currently are the Site Kit plugin, Google Site Kit plugin, which is, you may have heard of. It’s Google’s flagship plugin for WordPress and the new performance team, which was fairly recently formed.

[00:04:36 ] Nathan Wrigley: Did you have a background in WordPress or were you Google first and then WordPress a bit later? Or was it WordPress first and Google later?

[00:04:42 ] Felix Arntz: I come from the WordPress community. My first WordCamp was WordCamp Europe seven years ago, and then I joined the contributor day and I got to contribute and really got hooked on doing that. I got my first props for WordPress Core contributions back then, and I never stopped contributing since.

[00:04:59 ] Nathan Wrigley: It, kind of feels like if you were to rewind the clock that far, maybe a bit further, that Google and WordPress, there wasn’t really a connection there. it was one of many CMSs, but maybe I’ve got the timeline wrong there, but it does feel now as if Google is treating WordPress very seriously indeed.

You know, obviously with the market share being what it is, it’s good to get in there. Is that the case? Does it see WordPress as an important part of the ecosystem?

[00:05:23 ] Felix Arntz: Yeah, absolutely. I think historically it’s, it has not always been as much as that, as it has been since, I don’t know, 2017, 18, I think that’s where this really started. And yeah, that’s where Google started actively focusing more on WordPress. There had been smaller efforts here and there before, but that’s when it really started. And I started working for Google in the end of 2018, and with a few other people from the WordPress community.

[00:05:46 ] Nathan Wrigley: Well, your involvement in WordCamp Europe is all about performance and, I would imagine most people, and I’m gonna say that me included basically, I don’t really understand it. I know that it’s important. I know that performance matters, and I know that everybody is, has been talking about it for the last, let’s say eighteen, twenty months, specifically around Core Web Vitals and things like that, where we, we suddenly felt like the sky was falling in and everything needed to be rebuilt.

How important, does it really matter? And what I mean by that is if I’m just starting up a local website for a local shop and I can sort of rely on traffic to come to that website. Does it have any impact at all, or is this really just about the search engine? The search results for Google? So I’m trying to strike a balance with where we need to apply the most effort. So for most people it would be designing the website in the first place and things like SEO possibly, and performance possibly they come much further down the pecking order of what they want to worry about.

What’s your insight? Is it super important or is it a thing that we can leave till a little bit later?

[00:06:47 ] Felix Arntz: I would say that performance and SEO have a little bit of similarity just in the sense that they both actually affect, they should affect, user experience. The end