Oh. I missed that Wordpress 7.0 launched yesterday?? Forgot to mention that I have WP Core performance contributors next week on the 23rd anniversary on WP, May 27th. Join @weston.ruter.net Adam Silverstein, Aditya Dhade and myself for ✨ SPDY STREAM 35 ✨ www.youtube.com/live/tFK9qZB...

SPDY STREAM 035 with The WordPress Core Performance Team 🎂

YouTube video by Henri Helvetica

youtube.com

Time to do some in-person WordPress contribution! I'm a Table Lead at the Core Performance table alongside @b1ink0.bsky.social. #WCAsia

Time to do some in-person WordPress contribution! I'm a Table Lead at the Core Performance table. #WCAsia

How I've just enabled Claude Code to access all abilities registered with the Abilities API via MCP in the wordpress-develop environment, in preparation for the WordCamp Asia (#WCAsia) Contributor Day tomorrow:

Adding an MCP Server to the WordPress Core Development Environment - Weston Ruter

How I've enabled Claude Code to access all abilities registered with the Abilities API via MCP in the wordpress-develop environment.

weston.ruter.net

It's a big day for @wordpress.org core PHP contributors and the overall quality of the core codebase: PHPStan is now part of the core development workflow! Changeset: core.trac.wordpress.org/changeset/61...

I’ve wanted this for a while: A way for the Post Date block in WordPress to automatically append the modified date, but only when it differs from the publish date. Finally published a writeup and a plugin to implement this:

Post Date Block: Published & Modified - Weston Ruter

Development of a WordPress plugin which appends the modified date to the Post Date block when it is different from the published date.

weston.ruter.net

If you're in PDX tomorrow (Jan. 13th), I'm sharing about web performance at our local WordPress Meetup, in person! I'm going over the perf work that landed in WordPress last year, how you can evaluate performance yourself, live side audits, and more: www.meetup.com/pdx-wp/event...

Speeding Up Your WordPress Site with WordPress 6.9, Tue, Jan 13, 2026, 6:30 PM | Meetup

**In-Person MeetUp at the [NW Portland Hostel](https://www.nwportlandhostel.com/)**, 479 NW 18th Ave, Portland, 97209. The most recent release of WordPress includes many p

meetup.com

Something I've been thinking about a lot this Christmas season, so I blogged it:

Would Jesus have found refuge in the United States? - Weston Ruter

When Mary and Joseph fled Judea to protect Jesus from Herod, would they have been welcomed as refugees in America if he had been born today?

weston.ruter.net

I used WordPress Playground for the first time in a support forum reply to try to reproduce a bug report. Super nice! I made a test plugin in a gist, within which I included a blueprint.json to self-install and set up the test case to repro with 1 click: wordpress.org/support/topi...

WordPress 6.9 broke site layout

WordPress 6.9 broke site layout theinfoprovider (@theinfoprovider) 1 week, 6 days ago After the automatic update to WordPress 6.9 (and/or Gutenberg plugin 19.5), the entire front-end design of our …

wordpress.org

Meet WordPress 6.9 “Gene”. This release delivers collaboration with soul. Notes in the editor, smooth drag and drop, new creative blocks, and faster performance across your site. Discover what is new and upgrade today: wordpress.org/download/releas... #WordPress

I'll be there.

WordPress@wordpress.org · 8mo ago

State of the Word has always been better with friends. Join the WordPress community on December 2 for a live watch party at TinkerTendo. Meet other builders and discuss what you are inspired to create next. Details here: www.meetup.com/wordpress-sf/e... #StateOfTheWord #WordPress

I'm really excited for the @wordpress.org 6.9 release! There's. A. Ton. The field guide is now live, and it proves my point (it's a doozy). I'm looking forward to seeing the community build on top of the new Notes feature, which unlocks new ways to collaborate!

WordPress 6.9 Field Guide

This guide outlines major developer features and breaking changes in 6.9 and is published in the Release Candidate phase to help inform WordPress extending developers, Core developers, and others. …

make.wordpress.org

WordPress 6.9 to Bring Performance Gains With fetchpriority Support, Increased Inline CSS, and New Output Buffer

WordPress 6.9 Release Candidate 2 is now available for testing. This vital milestone invites you to download and test the latest features that aim to enhance your experience. Your feedback is crucial for the final release! Ready to dive in? Get the release here: wp.me/pZhYe-526 #WordPress

WordPress 6.9 includes so many performance improvements! Scripts with fetchpriority, increased inline CSS, minified theme styles, on demand block styles in classic themes, the template enhancement output buffer, and much more! Check out the field guide:

WordPress 6.9 Frontend Performance Field Guide

This post is the latest in a series of updates focused on the performance improvements of major releases (see 6.8, 6.7, 6.6, 6.5, 6.4, 6.3, and 6.2). WordPress 6.9 is the second and final major rel…

make.wordpress.org

Worked nights and weekends (and days) to get these performance improvements landed! Getting 6.9 out the door on December 2nd will be a great relief. Hoping for a >20% boost to Largest Contentful Paint for Christmas! 🎄

WordPress@wordpress.org · 9mo ago

The Release Candidate 1 for WordPress 6.9 is here! This milestone invites you to explore enhanced Site Editor features, performance improvements, and updates across the board. Your testing is crucial in building a better WordPress. Join the journey and test the RC1 version now: wp.me/pZhYe-51z

As I was saying…

Jimmy Kimmel is Back!

YouTube video by Jimmy Kimmel Live

youtu.be

Big thanks to @weston.ruter.net for joining me on the ✨ SPDY STREAM 009 ✨ yesterday. Lots of details were shared about the progress on the #WordPress platform re: performance. This should edited for next week.

I love this new post from Speed Kit. They divide up the 2.5-second “Good” threshold for LCP into two additional thresholds: Instant (300ms) and Fast (1000ms), while the current Good threshold becomes merely “OK”.

Don’t Settle for “Good”: It Is Time for New LCP Thresholds | Speed Kit

We at Speed Kit are now extending Google's LCP thresholds in all our dashboards by adding two additional buckets to show more details for page loads faster than 2.5s.

speedkit.com

Just landed in WordPress trunk: scripts and script modules can be registered with a `fetchpriority` arg, and the Interactivity API script modules and comment-reply script use `low` by default. This can improve LCP by ~7% when the LCP element has an image: core.trac.wordpress.org/changeset/60...

Changeset 60704 – WordPress Trac

Blog Tool and Publishing Platform

core.trac.wordpress.org

I've joined @wpengine.com to contribute full time to WordPress core, continuing the performance work I started while at Google:

Joining WP Engine - Weston Ruter

I've joined WP Engine to contribute full time to WordPress core, continuing the performance work I started while at Google.

weston.ruter.net

I just presented “The Site Speed Frontier with Performance Lab and Beyond” at WordCamp US. Shortly before my talk, I published a companion blog post that has 10x the information I had time to share, and I've just added an embed of the livestream: weston.ruter.net/2025/08/27/t... #WCUS

The Site Speed Frontier with Performance Lab and Beyond - Weston Ruter

Analysis of the LCP impact for optimizations featured by the Performance Lab plugin and proposed for WordPress core. Presented at WCUS 2025.

weston.ruter.net

My blog has reached a web performance milestone: It's now in CrUX for both mobile and desktop (at the origin level), and it passes the CWV assessment for each! But the web performance journey isn't over…

Web Performance Milestone - Weston Ruter

My blog is now passing the CWV assessment on desktop and mobile in CrUX and has 100 in Lighthouse! But the web performance journey isn't over.

weston.ruter.net

I've just made some updates to my Portland picks post for WordPressers coming to my town for #WCUS: weston.ruter.net/2024/09/12/m...

My Portland Picks - Weston Ruter

Since so many of my teammates and colleagues are converging on my hometown of Portland, Oregon for WordCamp US, I've put together a list of some of my favorite things to do which may be helpful for WC...

weston.ruter.net

I've published a new WordPress security plugin: Strict CSP. It helps mitigate cross-site scripting (XSS) vulnerabilities on the frontend and login screen (but not yet in the WP admin):

Strict CSP

Enforces a Strict Content Security Policy on the frontend and login screen to help mitigate any XSS vulnerabilities.

wordpress.org

¡Qué logro, ¿no?!

I've been enjoying Gemini Code Assist for GitHub. It is a very helpful AI code reviewer! I just learned it supports configuration via a .gemini/ directory, allowing you to provide a style guide. I've put together an initial one for my WordPress plugins: github.com/westonruter/...

Introduce code style for Gemini Code Assist by westonruter · Pull Request #1 · westonruter/wp-plugin-template

I just learned that Gemini Code Assist for GitHub supports a .gemini directory which can be used for configuration. One of these configuration files is a styleguide.md. This PR introduces an initia...

github.com

If you're using Additional CSS (Custom CSS) in the Customizer and have a Block Theme active, you may have noticed that live preview hasn't been working. This will be fixed in the next version of Gutenberg (21.4):

Planned performance improvements for WordPress 6.9, including: • script fetchpriority • output buffering • bfcache • CSS minification/inlining And more:

Roadmap to 6.9

WordPress 6.9 is scheduled to be released on December 2nd, 2025 with plans for a simplified editing mode in the Site Editor, improvements to template management, block leveling commenting, and more…

make.wordpress.org

Do you like instant navigations on the WordPress frontend? Speculation rules! What if speculative loading was also in WP Admin? Check out this new experimental plugin that adds prerendering with moderate eagerness for links in the Admin Menu and Admin Bar:

GitHub - westonruter/speculative-loading-admin: Adds speculative loading to the WP Admin for prerendering links with moderate eagerness in the Admin Bar and Admin Menu. Experimental.

Adds speculative loading to the WP Admin for prerendering links with moderate eagerness in the Admin Bar and Admin Menu. Experimental. - westonruter/speculative-loading-admin

github.com