WordPress Contributors Speed Up Twenty Twenty-Four Default Theme Performance by 40%
WordPress 6.4 will be shipping a new default theme, Twenty Twenty-Four (TT4), expected in early November. This theme is more feature-rich than previous default themes, and contributors have been working on identifying potential performance improvements that can be made ahead of the release. As a starting point, Google-sponsored Performance team contributor Felix Arntz conducted several benchmarks comparing TT4 with the TT3 block theme. These included overall Web Vitals covering both server-side (TTFB) and client-side (LCP-TTFB), along with a separate server-side load time performance benchmark. Arntz posted a summary of this data: For the home page: Overall load time (LCP) is 58.8% slower. Client-side performance (LCP-TTFB) is 93.5% slower. Server-Timing (wp-total) is 71.8% slower. For the singular post: Overall load time (LCP) is 3.9% slower. Client-side performance (LCP-TTFB) is 40.1% faster. Server-Timing (wp-total) is 42.3% slower. He noted that the reason TT4 is slower is because it provides a lot more feature rich content out of the box than TT3. “Interestingly, the server-side performance difference between TT4 and TT3 seems to come almost exclusively from the number of block editor features used by the theme, but not by any problems from the theme itself,” Arntz said. “In fact, the theme only…
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